Wow...anyone think this will lead to some heated debate? ;)  Just a reminder to everyone, let's do our best to keep this civil!

from another thread:


At the moment of conception, it's a single cell.  A human cell, but not a human being.  I'll recover my position on this in a moment.  But first, in regards to your idea about asking people if they wish they were aborted:  ask anyone you know if they wish that their parents had not had sex.  I think you'll get just the same answer.  Is that a reason to ban people from not having sex?  Should abstinence be illegal?

In general, the problem with the abortion debate is that both sides are treating it as a binary switch, rather than a continuous dial.  Both sides view it as a situation where there's something that's 100% not a human being one moment, and then instantly becomes 100% a human being in the blink of an eye.  The pro-choice side says that magical transformation happens at birth, and the pro-life says it happens at conception.  The trouble is that they're both wrong.  It's not an instantaneous change.  It's a slow, gradual change, that takes place over 9 months.  There's no moment when there's a huge, fundamental change.  Rather, there's a long period of very gradual changes that add up to a big change over nine months.  A fertilized egg is a lot more like an egg cell and a sperm cell next to each other than it is to a baby.  And a fetus five minutes before birth is much more like a baby five minutes after birth than it is to an egg cell.  By treating the problem like a binary switch, we create a false impression that there's a huge change in zero time, rather than a lot of small changes over a long time.

The pro-life side needs to realize that killing a tiny ball of cells isn't the same as killing a 8.5 month fetus.  And the pro-choice side needs to realize that killing an 8.5 month fetus isn't the same as killing an unfertilized egg.

I cannot believe no one has run on this platform before...


I assume everyone here assumes it is NOT alright to kill a living human being, from the point of birth afterwards (if you are okay with infanticide, well I suppose that's its own discussion, and one I wouldn't mind arguing either side for :P)  On the other hand, I'll assume everyone is comfortable with killing sperm and eggs (not so sure how I'd argue that one...)  So we know that at some point this 'mass of cells' (whether those cells are simply a sperm and an egg, or something else) becomes a real human being, and legalizing abortion requires setting a line somewhere in the middle.

Given this assumption, I'd have to say that, to avoid accidental infanticide, we need to be conservative with this.  If we set the line too early, the cost is we have some 'unwanted' children.  If we leave the line too late, the cost is we kill someone (specifically, millions). I'd tend to think that 'unwanted' children are the lesser evil, so we need to keep that line pretty early.  I personally would be extremely uncomfortable with anything later than the first trimester (since at this point the fetus has most major organs running).  Within that first trimester, it would be some debate as to where exactly the line should fall, but again, I'd push to keep it conservative.

I think there should be something a bit more dynamic than just a simple yes/no point.  The later the abortion, the worse it is, I would say.  Viewing it as a 100% okay at some point, and 100% not okay at some other point is where the problem arises.  Phrasing it as "at some point the mass of cells becomes a becomes a real human" makes it sound like a sudden, binary switch.  There's not "some point" is my argument.  There's a long period over which this happens.

It's not an issue of "if we make it legal too late, we'll kill real people," but rather, that later we make it, the more like people the things we will be killing are.  It's not an "are we killing people" question, but a "how much like people are the things that we're killing" question.  Just because something isn't 100% a person, we shouldn't assume there's nothing at all wrong with killing it.  But likewise, just because something is 10% a person, we shouldn't assume it's the same as killing a baby.

A one size fits all, yes-no time limit doesn't seem like the right treatment of the problem to me.  Different situations would lead to different results, I would think.  The reason why someone is having an abortion should, in my view, impact how late one should be allowed.  If someone was raped, that's a different issue than if they just were careless.  If birth control failed, that's a different situation than if no birth control was used at all.  And so on.

I don't know just how such a law should be set up.  But I think a lot more agreement could be found if both sides realized that looking for a binary switch isn't what actually happens.

I have heard the best arguement for this and see if we can work through it.  The arguement was raise by Scott Klusendorf and he uses the SLED acronym.

Basically there are only four basic differences between a newborn and the unborn.

The first is S - Size.

Does a fetus, an embryo, and an infant vary in size?  Yes

Does this mean that because I am 6' tall and weight in at 300 lbs make me more of a person then most women?

Okay, just to keep the conversation rolling:
no, size by itself isn't an important issue.

So can we agree that a fetus and an infant don't have any difference in rights because of their size?

Yes, I think people would agree that any difference in rights isn't due to the difference in size.

Next letter is L - Level of development.

An embryo is less developed then an infant, and infant then a toddler, a toddler then an adolescent, then an adult, but all, except embryo, are giving rights as humans, even though they are at different levels.  My daughter is has not developed sexually, does this mean she is less then a person?  Does someone who's brain is underdeveloped, ie retarded, less a person?  Is someone with an IQ of 200 more human then someone with an IQ of 150?  No, all are given rights as human beings.

Thus to say that an embryo is not human by not being developed enough is an irrelevant point.

I actually would tend to say a newborn is less of a human.  They're sort of like larvae, really.  They just 'are'.  They don't show most of the traits I associate with a human (as opposed to an animal).  I don't think they're self-aware.  (Remember what I said about being able to argue on behalf of infanticide?)

I've been amazed watching my two and four-year-old children, as they seem to gradually develop these important abilities.  One day my eldest will come up and say something I'd never heard him say before, which belies a serious understanding of the world he didn't have previously.  It's actually sort of freaky.

But does this make them less human?  Is a caterpiller less of a butterfly?  Not really a caterpiller is a potential butterfly like an embryo is a potential human.
This message was last edited by the player at 20:50, Tue 14 Oct 2008.

Question about this stage of the theory: Would you also consider the sperm and the egg part of this stage of development? Is the single cell zygote that is created when these two merge human, and not the moment before, when these cells were seperate? When does personhood come into this equation?

Is the sperm and egg potential humans in the same way an embryo is?
This message was last edited by the player at 20:36, Tue 14 Oct 2008.

Err.. Yes.  It doesn't have wings.  A butterfly is, by definition, a creature with wings.  There are other differences as well.

Ultimately, I don't think anyone has an issue with killing human cells.  The issue is with killing a sentient creature.  Killing an AI or an intelligent alien would be as bad as killing a human.  But if it's sentience alone we're trying to protect, I dont' see any problem with eating killing infants.

Have to agree with Vexen on this one.  You can always find something less developed.  Do we stop at eggs?  Sperm?  The cells that create sperm and eggs?

However, I would again emphasis the point that it's a continuum, not a step.  A fetus is less of a person than a baby, but that doesn't mean it's 100% less of a person.  A fertilized egg cell is less of a person than is a 5 month fetus, which is less than 8.5 month fetus, etc.  Again, it's the search for a magical switch from 0% to 100% that causes all the trouble.  In reality, it's a matter of degrees.

No an egg and sperm are not humans like an amputated arm is not a human.  Also they are not potential humans because, by themselves, they can't make a human being, just like your skin cells can't grow to make another you (without help that is :P).

The single celled zygote is a human because, it has independant DNA at this point that makes it or will make it a human being.

Also to katisara, we haven't gotten that far yet <smack of the hand>.  <tisk tisk> No moving ahead in the text! :)

A fertilized cell can't make a human by itself either.  Without it's mother, it will die.  Actually, the same could be said for infants as well.

As for independent DNA, would it be okay to kill off one half of a pair of twins, since it has the same DNA as someone else?  Would it be different if the fetus was a clone of the mother?  If there is a mutation in one of skin cells, does it suddenly become unethical to let it die?  The DNA argument doesn't really stand up to closer scrutiny.  DNA isn't really what causes you to value a fetus, so it shouldn't be what you use to argue for it's value.  Sperm and eggs each have a unique set of DNA, different from all other sperms and eggs.  But it's fine to kill them, despite their unique DNA.  Lastly, people were opposed to abortion for the same reasons the are now before they knew what DNA was.  DNA isn't what makes something a person or not a person, anymore than our chemical make up is, or the fact.

Right, but we are talking about physical development here not intelligence, that comes later.

Your points about DNA make sense, but that doesn't change that the cell and the resulting infant are, in the end, the same.  So this still make the zygote a human being.

I'm not sure I buy that. There are those with genetic disorders that make someone have more genes, or less genes than the usual amount of person has. Is someone with Turner syndrome, who has less than a normal genome set, now less a person because they don't have a complete genetic set? I would say, if your argument is based on genetics, that it would.



Only if the zygote meets certain conditions. The mere fact that a sperm and egg meet doesn't mean that it'll become a baby if left uninterrupted. By the same token, the egg and sperm becomes a person if it meets certain conditions as well.

However, I'm curious about this argument of yours and seeing it in it's entirety. If you feel comfortable enough, please do continue.
This message was last edited by the player at 22:19, Tue 14 Oct 2008.

You are correct in your point Ms. I mean Vexen, but they are still no less human.  DNA makes us who we are and if there are not enough errors in the code, the zygote will become a human.  If the cell dies then I was God's choice to remove let it die and not ours.

See we're splitting hairs and our definitions truely don't matter.  You are welcome to your own opinion on wether a zygote is a human or not, I believe it is, but that doesn't change the fact that an embryo most deffinently is a human being when you take into account level of development.

Next arguement is E - Environment

An embryo is inside it mother and and infant is not.  Does this make an embryo less of a person?

If you say yes, did getting out of your car this morning make you less human?  What about when you walked out of your house, did you become more human?  Obviously not.  Then ask yourself this, how does 8" down the birth canal change anything?

Gammaknight, I think you're still making the same mistake that causes all the problems in this debate.  You still believe something has to be 100% a human being, or 0% a human being, with nothing in between.  You don't realize that something that can be close to being a human being, but not completely one.

What you're actually doing here is increasing the definition of "human being" to include embryos, with the intent of turning around and saying "Ah ha! you agree it's a human being, so now you have to agree it's not okay to kill it, because we all agree it's not okay to kill human beings!"  You're trying to make use of the fact that we agree it's not okay to kill human beings, but what you need to keep in mind, is that some of the people who agree to that don't think embryos are human beings.  If you change the definition of human beings to include embryos, then you no longer have the universal agreement that it's not okay to kill human beings.  Similar to if you change the definition to include insects, then there'd be plenty of people who would think it's okay to kill human beings (of the insect variety).

As to environment, it's not just that the infant is inside the mother, but rather that it's still a part of her.  It's not yet an independent creature.  If you think being inside a car is the same as being physically and biologically attached to another creature, you drive a different sort of car than I've ever been in! ;)

At the end of the day, the things that make us think its wrong to kill people are the qualities people have.  Things such as (but not necessarily limited to) sentience, desires, comprehension, etc.  It's not the DNA.  If a robot had all the qualities of a human being, but was made from metal, it'd be wrong to kill it too.  Or if an animal had all these qualities, it'd be wrong to kill it (and I would say many animals do have some degree of them, but that's another topic).  It's not really the fact that it's 'human' that matters, but rather the fact that it has these qualities that we value.  An embryo does not have all of these qualities.  They really are something different.

What you seem to be doing is trying to equate a single cell with a full grown adult.  But they are very, very different qualitatively.  They are very much not the same thing.  They have very different properties.

Also, you seem to be ignoring the issue of degree.  You're saying "this small difference isn't something we find important, so this huge difference of the same type shouldn't matter either."  An anlogous argument would be something like "That building on the right is someone's home.  The one on the left is just the same, except they haven't finished painting one room.  We still consider them both homes even though there's a difference of completeness.  So completeness clearly isn't important.  These two nailed-together two-by-fours are just less complete than those buildings, but we've decided that completeness isn't important, so these two two-by-fours are a home too."

One more time: you're looking for a binary switch, when reality involves a continuous dial.  All things don't fit perfectly into 100% and 0% boxes.  Some things are somewhere in between.

True.  Yum.



None of which infants have either.

Oh yeah! I plug in baby!! :D


The main question though is: Are embryos human?  The arguement only points out the main differences/qualities.  True the embryo is dependant on its mother, but that arguement is covered in D, which I haven't gotten to yet.

Okay if you say that an infant is not a person because it is inside/attached to the mother, then what about siamese twins?  Is one of them less a human, because more of that twin is attached/subsummed by the other?

I hope that by this arguement everyone who reads it will say that killing the most helpless of our citizens is wrong, but what you do with the information is up to you.

Also once I am do with the arguement I will open the floor up for what you all think makes a human human.

May I move on?
This message was last edited by the player at 20:30, Wed 15 Oct 2008.

Not to be picky on technical terminology (back to what I was just saying with TitL and Falkus, *sigh*), but it is generally accepted embryo's are human.  They just may not be human beings.  A fingernail is human (it's human cells), it just not necessarily an individual human being.

This doesn't change the rest of your post, but it may influence posts later, so I thought bringing it up now would be worthwhile.

So far your SLED argument seems to be addressing the points of contention well.  S and E seem to be pretty accepted.  L is a point of contention though.  Is an embryo a human being, even while it is human?  Is a human corpse a human being?  What makes one a human being and the other not?  But go ahead, I'm curious about D.

I may actually have a point of contention with E. But, I am rather curious, so I can come back to it. Please, continue.

The last letter, D, stands for degree of dependancy, which lawyers and politicians call "viability."

Those who argue that viability makes all the difference are wrong. If they were right, many born human beings would have to be considered "non-people." For example, everyone dependent on pacemakers, dialysis machines, insulin, respirators, or wheelchairs would forfeit their status as people. After all, each relies on external help to survive and none are viable in the true sense of the word. In fact, newborn children cannot honestly be considered viable either, because without the care and feeding they receive from their parents, they quickly die. If we refuse to strip diabetics and newborns of their personhood on viability grounds, by what logic can we do so to embryos? As one former abortionist points out, there is no moral difference between a unborn child 'plugged into' and dependent upon a mother and a kidney patient plugged into and "dependent" upon a dialysis machine. Degree of dependency has no bearing on a human being's status as a person.

The complete arguement can be found at http://www.brainshavings.com/2...he-personhood-1.html
This message was last edited by the player at 23:37, Wed 15 Oct 2008.

I'm not sure if this has been said, but the straight forward reply to this, is just you believe that is how reality works, it doesn't mean that is reality.

You must agree that this is an opinion, a belief about how you view reality, right?

We don't base laws on how you view them, right?

So the simple matter is, reality does not have to be this way, reality can have 100% and o% It's no less reality because it disagrees with your view.
This message was last edited by the player at 01:21, Thu 16 Oct 2008.

But Tycho is right, it can vary, sometimes.

But as a red blooded male, everything is in its own little waffle square.  Don't let it touch, don't let it touch!!!!

I would agree that L is the largest point of contention with this argument, and indeed, for this argument to go forward, you almost have to assume that the Pro-Life principles are true, which makes it kinda like a self-fulfilling argument. I don't think this argument will persuade anyone who isn't already pro-life to agree with it.

"D" is one I find questionable as well, and it's linked with my aforementioned objection with "E". That these don't really translate well with the pridicament that is pregnancy. As Tycho so elequently pointed out, being inside another person and hooked upto their vitals is a little more complicated than being inside a car, or in a train, or at the beach.

But the biggest difference from comes from Dependancy on this one. Even accepting that this embryo is a person, I'm not entirely sure how much of a right a person, any person, has to forcibly take your body for it's habitat. When animals do this, we call them parasites and we take it upon ourselves to rid us of them asap if we don't want them (and I can't imagine why anyone would). Do parasites not have a right to live? Even if we are to say that this is a unique attribute to humanity, I'm wondering how much of a right you have, gammaknight, to take my body without permission and hook yourself upto it, even if that was your only chance to live, and how much of a right I have to refuse.

To take a page from Judith Thompson, imagine one day you woke up and found yourself hooked up in medical facility, with a tube comming out of your abdomin, which on the other end was connected to an unconscious man. As you discover this, several men, claiming to be this man's friends, apologize to you, but they say that they needed to do this for him to live, and you were the only one who could do it. The doctor with them states that after this process, you will recover just fine, but you will need to be attached to him for a length of time, roughly nine months, possibly more, possibly less, but around that rough estimate. So, now we have a person, who's undeniably a person, hooked up to you for survival, through no fault of his own, nor yours. Do you have a right to unhook yourself, or would such an action make you a murderer?

What conclusion would we have if we took the SLED approach? Well, let's go down the line:

"S" - Size. Well, there's no doubt on this one. He's without a doubt a fully grown adult person.

"L" - Level of Development. Admittedly, normally, in an abortion situation, this would come into question. However, in this case, there is no doubt whatsoever. It grants the Pro-lifer their argument on this one. This is a fully grown person.

"E" - Environment. You're both stuck in this medical room, but this argument says that even this environment doesn't make a person not a person. So, check.

"D" - Dependancy. In this case, this person is completely dependant on your body, through no fault of your own, nor his.  According to SLED, no matter what dependancy, this person is still a person.

So, this is without a doubt a person, and he needs your body for 9 months to live. It would seem then that those who use the SLED argument would behold you to give you no authority to free yourself. It is your moral responsibility to stay this way and allow him to live off your body, even if it impedes you in every way, interferes with your life, and causes a heavy period of discomfort. Because he's a person, and human life is more sacred than any of that.

Do you happen to agree with this? Do you feel that people who are hooked up without their concent to others for their survival shoudl be required to consent with it and go the full term? If people are taken against their will and required to share an organ or two, does it mean that these people are murderers if they choose to free themselves of it?
This message was last edited by the player at 00:28, Thu 16 Oct 2008.

I don't feel Tycho is correct, or right in this instance. Can you name an example where someone is 90% human? Does it require you to be diminished mental capacity? Does age make you less human? Such as being younger than 6 makes you 98% human, and being older than 82 makes you 94%? Does being inside the womb make you only 80% human? One hour from birth is 98% human?

Some countries have differing rules on when abortion can take place. So what who can place an objective value on what is considered human, and the percentage there of.

Firstly, it's ot like the embryo is doing this on purpose, intentionally abusing its rights to do so.  Secondly, we do agree that every person has a right to life, and that when rights conflict (for instance, the right to life vs. the right to property), we have to choose which trumps, and right to life generally trumps just about all of them.

Also, I think we all agree that a mother who refuses to breastfeed her infant and lets it starve, or the mother who has a c-section for no medical reason at 5 months for her convenience, knowing the child will grow up to have extreme mental retardation, asthma, and ultimately a very reduced quality of life are both doing wicked things, even though their rationale may be "their right to their own bodies outweighs the child's right to life".



There are some critical differences;
1)  This is a parasite you made.  If you make an animal, even a parasite, you are therefore responsible for it, whether that creation was intentional or not.  This isn't a leech you caught because you were swimming in dirty water, it's a living creature YOU made.
2)  This is a human.  Whether it's a human being is under some debate, but no one debates this is in fact a human.
3)  I know you don't have your own kids, but kids are financial and emotional parasites for most of their young lives.  They ruin marriages, take all your money, and give you a greater surplus of poop than you will ever possibly need.  Yet no one condones killing them (well, some people do, but generally not seriously).



I have to imagine it's about the same amount of right that you have to create another human, then destroy it for your own convenience.  Again, it's not like the fetus has any choice in the matter.  You as an adult do.



I don't think I need to explain why the example is false.  It seems to run on the supposition that women get pregnant by baby gnomes sneaking into their beds at night and planting baby pods in any unguarded... flowers.  It shifts all responsibility from the woman, the adult, and puts it instead on an embryo the size of her thumb and some mysterious men.  Since in the Thompson example, the woman (the victim) is put in that place through no action of her own, while most (and here I am excepting rape victims) women get pregnant through a direct action of their own.  Hence, they assume responsibility for their actions, and the risks inherent with them.  Driving drunk may be fun (in that it is fun to go to parties, to get drunk, and not fall asleep on the sidewalk), and most of us will engage in, or toe the line with this behavior at some point in our lifetime, but if we get into an accident doing this, no one says "oh, that family they hit in the minivan, they really had it coming.  Every person has a right to do to his body as he pleases, even if that results in his putting his car through a new family's vehile."

We decide out actions, we take our risks, we take our lumps.  Putting the responsibility for those lumps on the people who are hurt by them is, well, it's akin to making trillions of dollars in bad loans with high payoffs, then expecting a 700 billion dollar payout from the taxpayers when those loans fail to pan out!



So let me modify the example a little bit.

You hang around a hospital a lot.  You randomly sign up for tests or procedures.  It's never properly advertised what the procedure is until well after you've committed to it.  In most cases it's really nothing.  Now and again you may suffer permanent physical after effects, or even die, or other weird side effects.  But 24 times out of 28, nothing negative will come of it.  Every time you sign up though, you get a really delicious cookie and you really like those.  As it happens, you can also limit yourself to tests from certain doctors, so you may form a trust relationship with that doctor, but ultimately, each test you're still signing a paper without knowing precisely what you're signing up for until the next month.

As it happens, one day you wake up hooked up to another person.  The doctor comes over and says "great news, that test you volunteered for?  It's a complete success.  This man owes his life to you and your great sacrifice.  After 10 more months, it will be complete and this man will go on to live a perfectly normal life.  I hope you emjoyed your cookie!"

Now, at this point, do you have a right to say "you know what?  I changed my mind.  I really only did it for the cookie anyway.  Cut the guy off, I don't like this test."  After all, you made the decision.  This fellow had no choice at all, but now here he is, his life hanging in the balance.  Who should be punished in this case, the person who made a choice she regrets, or the person who made no choice at all?

I'm not sure it does. In your opinion, it does, appearently. But if right to life trumphs all, the death penalty wouldn't exist. If right to life trumphs all, no one should have the right to leathal force to defend property, and often times they do. If a person said "give me your coat or I'm going to kill myself" and life trumphs all, you'd have no right to refuse. If right to life trumphs all, no one would be allowed to deny medical proceedures based on whether or not medical insurance covers it. I think it's pretty clear that there's plenty of areas were right to life isn't a top priority. If we are to extend it to animals, in fact, I'd say it's very rarely a top priorty.



I'm sure you realise that there are other ways other than breastfeeding to feed an infant. I don't see how the right to their own bodies comes into a contradiction in this case. There's a difference between right to their bodies, and neglect. If she doesn't want the child after it's born, she could give it up for adoption, or give it to someone else. There's no right to body that I know of that would permit her to neglect a child after birth.

I'm curious as to what your solution would be in the latter case. Force her to have the child? The government stepping into her life to make sure that she goes to appointments and keeps herself healthy or be thrown into prison? Charge the doctor, because he decided to try to do what he could to ensure the safety of both best he can, instead of taking the chance of letting her take the more dangerous route of an illicit abortion that could threaten both her life and the child's? How would you choose to solve the situation that she no longer wanted the child?



Curious. If there was a parasite you made, would you have to let it live within you? Have you given up your right to deny it, and change your mind? What if you created a creature unintentionally, such as in the case of rape, or simply accidental impregnation (long shot, but there is a statistical chance that even those who never had sex could become pregnant).? If, say, there was a creature that used your genetic information to create young, would you have a responsibility to ensure their safety?



No, but I do sometimes wonder how much being a human really gives you in terms of innate rights. We humans kill other creatures all the time, for survival as well as mere comfort and enjoyment. We can kill people over property, we can kill over vengence, we can kill in the name of "justice". While in this case, the invader clearly isn't human, I think it's still worth it to debate what level of rights humans have, and how much better we are than other creatures.



Perhaps, but you would also argue that people who want kids get something out of it, don't you think? Such people who choose to raise children generally seem to place value from the expereince that far outweights that. Naturally, there are those that disagree, but don't many people have the choice of adoption if they don't think it's worth it? Should we outlaw adoption now, because the kids have a right to be with their natural parents, even if their parents don't want them?

I think you're confusing a pro-choice option as a pro-killing option. Most people's primary reason for doing this isn't that they want the child to die, simply that they don't want this pregnancy. The case of killing children above is a desire to kill, because there are other methods to get rid of the children right then. If I were adamant about having an abortion, and there was a way the child could live, say, an artificial incubation chamber, I wouldn't mind that option. There's no malice there, they simply want to be rid of the child within them, and if there was another way to not have this pregnancy but the child to live, I think they wouldn't mind choosing this option. There are acceptions, of course, aborting a child with heavy genetic defeats or one that has a high probability of being born with a life threatening condition (AIDS, for example), then that would obviously be a call for abortion, but I think that's not the intent of most people.



I think it's an unfair characterization to say that those that have an abortion all do it as a matter of convenience. And I think very few people who have an abortion were trying to have a baby in the firstplace. You place it almost as if women chose to create a baby, just to destroy it.

I wonder just how much choice matters though. Let's say a fetus had the ability to see it's future, and decided that this life wasn't worth living, and thus wanted to die. In that case, would you respond differently?



Well, you don't need to explain if you don't want to, but I would appreciate it if you did, because I have a few questions regarding this.

First, the exception of rape victims. Why? Sure, she didn't do anything that led to the creation of this child save living, but I thought this was about a child's right to life? What's special about this child that it no longer has that right to life? A child concieved out of a willing action is no more responsible for it than a child that's concieved by force. Why the exception?

If I may comment, it's almost as if you percieve pregnancy as a punishment, a consequence for taking certain actions. I know you don't mean it that way, simply because I've kinda grown to know you a little better than that over the past year, but taking straight from this argument, it would seem as if it were the case. And, that if you haven't done anything to contribute to it's taking place, you shouldn't have to suffer it. Keyword, suffer.

The responsibility debate has it's limits as well. You seem to argue that, if a woman did a risky action that may result in pregnancy, it's her fault, she should had known from the start. If you drink, that it's your responsibility of what happen while you're drunk. I'm not stating that this is necessarily wrong, but there's some interesting arguments to be made if you believe this too far.

For example, victim blaming. It's very similar to the radical muslim take on woman's issues. If there's the possible risk, it's the woman's fault to putting herself there. If a woman drinks, becomes drunk, and has sex in her state, it's her fault, because she shouldn't had been drinking. If a woman walks down a dark alley, and get's blindsided and raped, it's her fault, because she shouldn't had been walking down the dark alley alone. If a woman goes to a party and someone spikes her drink, it's her fault, because she should had known someone could do that. If a woman goes into a car with four men and is raped, it's her fault, because she shouldn't had been places with men who aren't her family members. This is the basis for the woman's restrictions in radical Islamic countries, and why a woman can be punished for being raped. Because she shouldn't had been in that place, at that time, wearing those clothes. It doesn't absolve the other participants, but she shares a stake in the responsibility as well, and should suffer the consequences.



Once again, it seems as if you're painting pregnancy as a punishment. What about those who didn't have a say in the matter? Granted, not the most common case, but it happens often enough. Why is it you seem to give a freebee to the rape victim, even though the child has nothing to do with it?

I think Thomson's arguments on this matter have given me two conclusions about abortion, according to her arguments (there are several in her rather famous essay, A Defense of Abortion: it's either permissiable in every case, or it's not permissiable in any case. No one is saying commendable. Contrary to what many abortion critics seem to state, no one views this as a fun or easy decision. But you either have the right to do it as you think is best, or no one ever does. Even in the case of a life threatening pregnancy, why is the child's right to life considered negligable in this case? Why is it okay now? That child's right to live has to be accounted for just as much as the mother's. If anything, it would veto the mother's decision to abort, leaving no choice.




I'm not sure that change made it much different from what it already was. Yes, it means it was resulting from a more consentual action, but the implications are more or less the same.

Persoonally, I would say she does have a right, in fact, to get out. Now, I'm not sure it would be considered a commendable action, and maybe not terribly reasonable, I could agree with that. I wouldn't particularly blame the doctor or the man's friends trying to convince her otherwise. I'm not sure it would be an ideal action. But I think she has a right to do it, yes.

The person on the other side has been put in an unfortunate possition, horrific indeed, but so is a person who's dependong in an organ donation. If someone originally decided to give an organ to that person, but backout at the last moment. Are we to force that person to give the organ afterall? Should we have government agents hunt this person down and forcibly take their organ from them? It's not a perfect anology, admittedly, but I think the reason that it's objectable there could be applied to here as well. It's certainly not the other persons fault he's in his position, but it's simply an unfortunate circumstance that we can't force someone to give their body for.
This message was last edited by the player at 05:08, Thu 16 Oct 2008.

This is more of a moral issue that the woman has to come to terms with, but she should be given all the information rather than just yanking the poor kid out.



If you created a parasite, it is your creation and you should be allowed to destroy it, but, with only one case, no woman has ever created a child without the help of a man.  Rape is a hard thing.  I am not taking away from how horrible the act is and if it was up to me, I would make it punishable by death, but is the rape the child's fault?



Better than animals?  Animals don't kill there kids in the womb, some do after their born, but not before.  They're at least given a chance to run away.



Sometimes this is unavoidable, but I'm sure you already know this. :)  At least the parents giving their children up gives the kids a chance to live.



Pro-choice is just a touchy feely way of saying pro-abortion.  Why do they call it pro-choice?  Because if you call it pro-preinfacy slaying then everyone would be against it, but wrap it up in something nicey nice then less people will stand against you.  Still I think you should give them the chance to live and not destroy them just because you don't want them or you think it will be to hard on them.



Like I tell my boys, if you have sex expect to get her pregnant, because maybe not today and maybe not tommorow, but eventually the numbers will catch up with you and then what?  If you are ingadging in sex you have a chance of geting pregnant or catching an STD.  What planed parenthood wants you to believe is that you sould be able to ingage in reckless behaivor without any consiquences, but this is just not true.



This is a mute arguement, what if pigs could talk?  Would that make them less tasty?  What if's that are improbable are not a good example.



I second the need to explain.  Though I don't agree with Vexen, you should at least explain your arguement. :)



As I covered earlier there shouldn't be an exception.  If you allow one, then you have to allow them all.  It is still not the child's fault the female in question was raped.



This is how our laws are suppossed to be set up.  Fine do what you want, but you have to suffer the consiquences.  I don't know of any kind of sex that can't lead to pregnacy.  Oral - could dribble down you chin into the vagina.  Hand - could shoot at you into the vagina.  Anal - hello! It's right next to it.  Though the chances are extreme, they are not impossible.  I personally know a girl that was not ingaging in any penetration, just dry humping.  They both had there underwear on, but she still go pregnant.  So the chance is out there, just slim.



See above.  The system, I think, doesn't punish this act well enough.  I like the Old Testament way of thinking.  Do wrong - Death!!  But will never happen in this country, because we are all to soft.



You still signed up for the tests in the above, so, even though you didn't forsee the consiquenses, neither did you try to find them out.

There is a differenc in your arguement.  In katisara's, she stated you were in the program by choice.  Vexen, you are seting up a program by force.  The two are not the same.

My point, though, is that that isn't the main question.  Again, you're trying to push the definition of "human" or "human being" to include embryos, but once you get people to agree with that, tacitly revert to a different definition of "human being," for which all (well, most) people agree it's wrong to kill them.  Like I said, it's not the fact that they're "human" that makes it wrong to kill people, it's the fact that they have these certain qualities.  "Human" is just a label.  It's not the actual important thing.  What "human" describes is the important thing.  Again, it's the qualities of humans that make it wrong to kill them, not just the fact that they're "human."


It's not so much an issue of "less human," but rather qualitatively different.  Operations occur to remove one siamese twin from the other.  There is debate about whether this is right or wrong, but its a different type of debate than would occur over whether its right or wrong to shot people at random from your window.


Again, I think you're missing the point.  The important thing isn't "what makes a human human," but rather, "what makes it wrong to kill a human?"

The last letter, D, stands for degree of dependancy, which lawyers and politicians call "viability."


Once again, you're ignoring the issue of degree, and treating every type of dependence as equal.  You're applying words with broad meaning to all cases, and ignoring the fact that the cases aren't equal just because they can be described by the same word.  How dependent and upon what something is dependent matters, not just that it is dependent.
This message was last edited by the GM at 10:07, Thu 16 Oct 2008.

Yes, just because I believe it doesn't mean it's reality.  We both have our opinions, but let's put it this way:  can you tell the difference between a fetus and an adult human?  If so, that means they are qualitatively different.  If differences exist, then treating them as 100% the same may not be appropriate.  The question becomes, which differences matter, and how much do they matter.

The "it's 100% human" and the "it's 0% human" arguments both are attempts to use a definition to solve the problem, rather than looking at the real issue of what qualities the embryo actually has.  It's using a prior assumption of "it's wrong to kill people," and trying to stretch or contract the definition of "people" to apply or not to apply.  Both sides are ignoring the more fundamental point of why it's wrong to kill people.  Both sides are ignoring the question of what qualities people have that make it wrong to kill them.

I think this is falling into the same trap as the pro-life camp, though.  It's expecting everything to be either 100% okay, or 0% okay, with no in between.  What we need to realize is that it's an issue of how okay it is.  As you say, it's not commendable in any case.  It's something everyone would rather never happen.  There is some level of "not okay" involved in every case.  The question, though, is whether is more okay to abort it, or to force the woman to have it against her will.  It's an issue of selecting a lesser evil, rather than an issue of whether it's an evil or not.

I think we all agree (correct me if I'm wrong, everyone), that there are two competing interests: that of the woman, and that of the embryo (and arguably a third interest, that of those who value the embryo).  I think expecting one interest to trump the other in every single case is unrealistic.  In different situations, the different interests have different values.

I think exploring this question would actually help us get a better handle on the abortion issue:
What is/are the difference(s) between humans and, say, chickens that makes it okay to kill one but not the other?  (for those who don't think it's okay to kill chickens, make it worms, or mosquitoes or whatever you do feel is okay to kill).

I'm not trying to show a baby yet to be born is an adult human. Human rights are not given only to adult humans.

Again, your opinion does not make it the real issue just because you think it is the real issue. I feel my point is saying that if you cannot accurately describe what makes someone 100%, that's its pretty clear you cannot say it's ok to kill someone at any other percentage.

You have this scale of a gradual increase, and then do not give any attributes to show where someone is along that percentage. That's rather useless to describe it one way, but then have no markers to show how that scale is even used. Compare that to a game of darts, where each spot is unnumbered. While for fun it is good, for telling where someone is along the game, it is useless.
This message was last edited by the player at 12:47, Thu 16 Oct 2008.

To a child, then?  To a baby?  Whatever you are trying to show it is equal to, put that into my question again, and ask it again.


Can the same be said of your opinion?


It's not pretty clear.  In fact, it's not clear at all.


You're stuck looking for absolutes, TitL, rather than observing relative differences.  If you stand two people next to each other, I can tell which one is taller, even if I don't have a tape measure to determine how tall each of them are.  If you walk into the living room, and your friend is watching a baseball game, and you ask "what's the score?" and they answer "Red Soxs are up by two," you still don't know the score, but you do know who's winning, and how close the game is.  You're looking for absolute numbers, but in this case, the numbers aren't particularly meaningful, as you'd just use them to draw another hard-and-fast line in someplace on a gradual spectrum.  What I keep trying to tell you is that looking for something that's 100% okay or 100% wrong is what's causing all the disagreement.  What you should be looking for are things like "is this worse than that?"  or "Given these two bad choices, which do we prefer?"

Also, you didn't give an answer to the question I put in msg #35.  Care to give it a try?

I'm going mostly off of legal interpretations.  Most states say you cannot kill in self-defense unless you feel your life or the life of someone else is DIRECTLY threatened.  So I can't shoot someone who is stealing my car.  This is because the law says the right to life, even a criminal's life, outweighs my right to property, even as a victim.  Similarly, if someone attacks me with his fists, I cannot pull a knife (since my right to be safe from harm is less than his right to life).  So this isn't something I'm making up, there are hundreds of years of caselaw supporting it.  If you feel that the legal system is wrong, well that's a different matter.  But it isn't MY opinion.



We can go into the difference between ommission and commission and how that changes right to life vs. right to property if you'd like, but that is a a different discussion (which we may go into soon :P)

But yes, in most states, while it is legal to deny a life-saving medical procedure to someone who cannot afford it, it is NOT legal to kill that same person if he is stealing that same amount of money from your home.

You could argue that, if the embryo were to die naturally unless you did something to save it, that you could decide not to take that action and let the embryo and therefore you're okay.  But that isn't the same as an abortion, which is intentionally seeking out and destroying the embryo.





Fair enough.  A woman on a deserted tropical island who decides she doesn't care to breastfeed any more would be morally liable for her decision (there are no other options, either she gives up some control of her body to support the baby, or she doesn't).



If she waited until the fetus is viable, and there's no medical need?  Yes.  I would make it illegal to abort the baby at that point.  Carry it, at minimum, until it can be birthed without serious ramifications.  The whole health checkups are the sort of minutae I wouldn't care to hammer out here and now, but it would be a possibility.  At that point, where the fetus is literally three inches short of the full rights of personhood (as in, the fetus is the size, level of development, etc. of normal people), that child's (because it IS a child at that point) rights need to be protected.



This argument has come up before and frankly, I consider it sort of silly.  If we decide that an abortion is morally wrong (note, that's an assumption), how does it make it okay suddenly as long as it's done in a "safe" method?  Would murder be alright as long as we put in the controls necessary to avoid any collateral damage?  Of course not.  So if we decide abortion at that point is wrong, hiring a professional instead of an untrained abortionist isn't any better.



Probably the same way I'd solve the situation if I decided I didn't want to have a house any more.  I would have to wait until the situation allows me to sell.  I can't just say 'meh, I don't feel like cleaning my house today.  I'll just walk away and let the bank deal with it.'

I make decisions, I take responsibility.  Sometimes that means I have to suffer a little for poor choices.  In this case, not only was the decision that led to conception in the first place, but the decision to wait five or six months before addressing it.  It would take a pretty extraordinary situation to justify an abortion in this case (maybe if a woman is raped by her brother while on a desert island and was only just rescued.)




Yes, if I made an animal of any sort, I would feel some responsibility for it.  If that animal happens to also be human, I would feel a lot more responsibility for it.  You don't create something just to cause it to suffer.  That's wasteful and wrong.  Even now that I raise rabbits for food, I wouldn't kill baby bunnies just because I didn't think ahead to make enough space for them.  I'm responsible for them.



If I accidentally made another animal, I would feel just as responsible for it (although it's more likely to require that given the circumstances).  Heck, right now we're caring for a kitten we found in a neighbor's yard.  I didn't even make the cat, but we're looking at how much we'll have to spend to get it fit for adoption.  You don't kill needlessly, and you don't create life where you put that life in that situation.




You mean like a mosquito?  No.  At that point it took that from me without my knowledge or consent, and did things I had no control over.  The fact that it's my genetics has nothing to do with it.  It's consent, responsibility for actions and a respect for life.



Some, but not all, and certainly not all the time.



I don't think anyone has argued that is a right.  However, we do outlaw killing your children (for any reason), because children have a right to life.



But here's the thing, that is the result.  Again, no one can deny that abortion results in a death.  I think most people would agree it's okay to want money, but that doesn't mean I'm allowed to kill people to get it.  We have to weigh the ends (a fetus dying) against the cause (not wanting to be pregnant any more).

I'm not saying you can't make the case.  Tycho has done a good job.  But the idea that my comfort outweighs another's life seems sort of weak.

However, if you want to argue that abortion is more like manslaughter than murder, I'll agree with that.



Convenience meaning "The quality of being suitable to one's comfort, purposes, or needs:"

Yes, I think that's a fair characterization.  I am exempting those cases where the mother's life or serious health is at stake.  If the the mother would lose her legs as a result, that wouldn't be 'for convenience'.  If the mother would have to move to another apartment or change jobs, that IS for convenience.

We can discuss those abortions caused by reasons beyond convenience (mother's life in danger, baby would be unable to survive, etc.) at another time.  I'm focusing primarily on those who COULD carry the baby to term without serious risk, but doesn't care to.



In almost all cases, the women (and men) do choose behaviors which they know results in making babies.  If the woman did not know pregnancy results from sex, she may be exempted.



That's a question about suicide.  The fetus chooses, not the mother.  Since it's the fetuses life, it's a different question.  Do I support suicide made by rational actors?  I don't know.  Falkus does make a compelling argument.  For fun, I'll say yes.





I sort of did anyway, but I'll go over it again.

Most people know that babies are made by sex.
Most babies are the result of consensual sex.
Sex is not a required behavior.  It is easy to choose not to have sex, or to use appropriate methods to substantially reduce the risks of pregnancy.

Anyone in this place who gets pregnancy has, with knowledge, intention and foresight, engaged in behavior with a strong risk of negative repurcussions.  As they have chosen this course of action themselves with no lack of knowledge and foresight, they and only they are responsible for the results of that action.

If any of those are missing, if the person were not aware sex results in babies, was forced into sex without consent, or was unable to determine that THIS sex might result in babies (for instance, if she engaged in oral sex but somehow got pregnant anyway), responsibility for the fetus would be substantially reduced.

However, the example paints it as though she had neither knowledge, intention OR foresight.  Hence why it is a false example.



To go back to what Tycho said, we need to weigh values and resonsibilities.  If you maintain your car, but your tire explodes, sending you into someone else's car and killing that person, you would not be responsible for that death.  Abortion in the case of rape is still an intentional choice, but it would be less unethical.

At this point I hope we can also agree that abortion at any stage is at least a little unethical.  To touch on Tycho's point, eating chicken is probably also a little unethical.  Killing an animal to eat it, while necessary and natural, still results in a death, even a justified one.  It is ending the life of another.  It is not desirable.  The only reason why people would choose an abortion is because the unethical and painful choice of going through the procedure is (in theory) less than the painful and unethical result of not.  It's choosing the lesser of two evils.  If anyone truly thinks that there is nothing about an abortion which makes it an undesirable course (even if it is at times necessary), please feel free to correct me.



Not a punishment, but yes, a consequence for taking actions.  My paying a mortgage isn't a punishment, but it is a consequence.  Pregnancy is not very fun.  Even women who want to get pregnant almost never enjoy the pregnancy.  But it isn't a punishment, just a natural consequence.



This ignores the intention, knowledge and foresight of the rapist.  She was responsible for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  She wasn't responsible as soon as the rapist started using force to get what he wanted.

That's the critical difference.  The sperm, the egg, the embryo, none of them have intention, knowledge or foresight.  All of that falls back onto the last rational actors, the man and woman having sex.

That isn't to say it's right.  I don't think pregnancy is great.  But neither is abortion.  Abortion is not undoing what happened.  Again, I'm assuming you agree here that abortion is an unhappy situation, to be avoided whenever possible, and only chosen because it is the lesser of two wrongs.  Should women who choose to have sex have to suffer either abortion or pregnancy?  Well, I don't think they should have to.  But clearly the physical world is such that they do.




"Should have known" does not cut it.  If "she knew", THAT would suffice.  Knowledge, not 'should have knowledge'.  So not only does she not hold responsibility because she is not the actor in spiking the drink, (and when she drank it, she lacked knowledge), but she clearly lacked knowledge that the place was risky at all.  Her responsibility is basically negligible.



I disagree in that the woman is responsible for her decision in this case.  But since you don't seem to think responsibility is an important factor, I can understand why you wouldn't see it as a significant difference.



But didn't she make a commitment?  And how does her convenience outweigh someone else's life?  Is it okay for me to tell people I'll help them scale buildings by holding the rope, then decide it's hurting my hands and let go?



The difference there is the recipient is not in any worse a case than he would have been otherwise.  If she backed out while the recipient was laying on the operating table, chest split open, liver removed, yes, that would not be acceptable.

So tell me what the main question is.  Also I'm not trying to push the definition, I am only showing that to say that birth alone makes you human is a flawed idea.  In that case, when a person murders a pregant woman, that person should not be charged with killing two people.



But is the siamese twin that has a lesser cell count, less human?  Yes or No.  Weither they should be seperated or not is irrelevant.



But the definition of what is a human is the main reason it is okay to kill the innocent babies.  People don't abort children because they know its a human, they kill it because it has been pushed on them that it isn't.  What makes it wrong to kill a human is a totally different arguement from the one I am bringing up.



I have heard that too.



Then tell me what the difference is between the two.  What is the difference of a child being dependant on it mother and a lung cancer patient dependant on an iron lung?  The only differance I can see is one is biological and one is mechanical, but I am interested in finding out how you would answer the question.

A rather charged issue, abortion.  My feelings are that it should only be performed if the mother was raped and can't/won't have anything to do with the child, or if a compotent medical professional states that the pregnancy has severe health risks for the mother or child.  A lot of the people that are having abortions simply because a child would be inconvienient should probably be sterilized, since they obviously haven't been taking enough care with their birth control stuff.  And many of the children who have been aborted should have been adopted into a loving family - plenty of those around.

The main question is what I've been talking about the whole time: avoiding semantics of human/non-human, and asking what are the qualities that matter.  I agree that the idea that birth alone makes you human is flawed.  But that's a matter of the definition of human, and definitions shouldn't change what's right or wrong.  If it's wrong to kill a fetus, then it should be wrong no matter if we call it human or not.  If it's okay to kill a fetus, then it should be okay regardless of whether its called a human or not.  What determines whether it's okay or not isn't the word we use to describe it, but the actually properties that it has.


Yeah, and I think they shouldn't.  They should be charged with killing a pregnant woman and a fetus.  That can and should be considered worse than killing just one woman.  But I don't think it should be considered the exact same thing as killing two women, because it's not the same thing.



Yes or no?  Depends on how we define "human," which is a purely semantic issue, not a moral one.  Contrary to what you say, it's not at all irrelevant if they should be separated or not.  That's the whole point.  What should or shouldn't be is what we're talking about.  But you're trying to solve that with semantics, by using word play, rather than getting at the heart of the matter, which is "what is it about a fetus that makes it wrong to kill it?"  What are the traits, properties, etc., that make it important.  And how do those compare to the traits that the woman has?  The human/not-human debate is an attempt to avoid the more difficult issue, and just "define" the issue away.



I find it very sad if you can't think of a better reason not to kill something than the label that someone has attached to it.  If the only reason you think its wrong to kill children is because we call them human, then I don't think you've thought deep enough about the issue.  You're following simple rules without knowing why the rules exist.  While I agree, to a degree, that it is because people are convinced that a fetus isn't a person that they think it's okay to kill it, I think it's wrong of them to use that line of reasoning.  They're falling into the same mistake that you are, they just draw a different imaginary line somewhere, and treat it like it's not imaginary.


Then you're missing the real issue.  What makes it wrong to kill a human is exactly what we should be talking about, because that's what we need to look at to determine if its wrong (or how wrong it is) to kill a fetus.  Again, you're making a semantic argument, rather than making an argument based on reality.  You're talking about labels, rather than about actual qualities.  Go deeper.  Look at the real issue, not just the words we use to describe the issue.


Well, for one, the iron lung doesn't have a preference about the existence of the person attached to it.  It doesn't have any desires or goals or rights to consider, whereas a mother does.  If the mother weren't involved in a pregnancy, but instead some mindless machine gave birth, then it would be a very different situation.  Like I've said before, it's not an issue of saying "oh, there's absolutely nothing wrong at all with killing a fetus," but rather an issue of saying "how does the badness of killing the fetus compare to the badness of requiring the woman to give birth to an unwanted child?"
Another aspect of your analogy is important:  disconnecting someone from life support is very different from going out into the street and randomly shooting someone.  Both kill someone, but we view the two acts very differently, because while they both result in someone dying, they are qualitatively different. That's what I'm talking about with the issue of degrees.  You're looking at this in a "perfectly 100% okay or 0% not at all okay" way, where I'm saying you have to look at it in continuum.  It's not a switch, but a dial.  It's not an issue of "is bad or not" but one of "how bad is it?"

I am trying to compare an unborn human is a human.


Sure it can. So let's talk about the real issue, killing humans. Just in case it's overlooked, it's the wording that is problematic. You're stating the other views are not the real issue, but offer nothing that is even supportable by your own definitions. You're reducing their views as not real, but there doesn't seem to be any real way of showing their views are not the issue.



Can you give me any reason it's ok to kill someone without using any descriptions that are qualitative?  To be clear, if there is nothing that can stand up to making it ok, then there is nothing that can say it is not ok either.

The kicker is people are saying it's ok at less than 100% but cannot actually show where it is not 100%, or what brings it up from 70 to 71%, or any other point along that line.


I'm still unclear how you can show there is any differences. I get you're saying there are differences, but I don't get where or how you are showing there is any gradual change that matches up with what actually happens. For example, a baby 8 inches from the womb entrance is what percentage?

  100% ok, and 100% not ok seems realistic, since there is no sort of killing, or 50% dead, or 96% alive. Relative and human life can be discussed, but in the end, absolutes are the reality of how we decide things.


It's ok to kill animals, because they are food.

Like TitL said, their not human.  We are higher beings that are at the top of our food chain, so we should be able to kill and/or eat them if we wish.  I'm not saying we should just open wholesale killing on anything, but killing the creatures below us in the chain should not carry any guilt.

By the by, I am perposely not putting in anything about my religious beliefs into the above so as to avoid the obvious. :)

Okay.  And can you honestly tell me that you can't tell the difference between the two?  If I brought in a 25 year old person, and a 25 day old embryo, could you tell which was unborn?


Your making an entirely semantic argument here, TitL.  I'm saying that we shouldn't be making decisions based simply off arbitrary labels, but rather based on something more substantial.  If it's wrong to kill a fetus, then you should be able to demonstrate that even to someone who doesn't agree that it should be called a human.  The debate over person/not person misses the point, because regardless of what we call the fetus, its properties don't change.  It's the exact same thing whether you call it a person or not.  The label you attach to it isn't the important thing, but what it actually is, the qualities that it has, are important.  That's what I'm trying to get you talk focus on, rather than just using a purely semantic argument.


I'm not asking you to not use qualitative descriptions, but rather asking you to use them.  I want you to use qualitative descriptions, and avoid just using label that people don't agree upon.  In answer to your question, an example would be self defense.  Most people think it's okay to kill someone who's trying to kill you.  It's not that the person trying to kill you isn't human, or isn't a person, so it's okay to kill them.  They're still a human, still a person, but it's considered okay to kill them in that particular instance because of the special circumstances involved.  Now, we could debate if it's really okay to kill in self-defense, or under what situations it would be okay, etc., and it wouldn't come down to an issue of human/not human.  We would have to debate the qualities of the different situations.  We'd have to make statements like "it'd be okay to kill in that case because X, Y, and Z."  That's what I'm trying to get this discussion to be like.  I want you to make statements like "it's wrong to kill fetuses because they're X, they're Y, and they're Z," where X, Y, and Z, aren't just labels, but are actually objective descriptions that we all agree on.  You think a fetus is a human being, other people don't.  That's just a label.  It's just what other people call it.  It's not a true property of the fetus itself.  There are true, objective properties of the fetus that everyone can agree on, though.  Those are what people should be talking about.


Well, I'm not sure if "people" are saying this, since I haven't had much luck convincing anyone to look at it this way yet.  Most pro-choice advocates say it's okay at 0%, and not okay at 100%, just like you do, they just see a different point the things magically flip from 0% to 100%.
As for the difference between 70% and 71%, I think that is, roughly possible.  Maybe not down to a 1% accuracy, but we could definitely tell 25% from 75%, for example.


Are you honestly saying you can't tell a difference between a fertilized egg cell and an 8 month fetus?  I don't feel it should be too controversial that there is a gradual change that takes place over 9 months from a single cell into a baby.


You mean just minutes before birth?  99.9% or so, then.  If you mean 4.5 months before birth, then about 50%.  This isn't exactly rocket science here.  It starts at 0%, or just a tiny bit over, and reaches 100% at birth.  We could debate if it's a linear change or not, but I think that's not particularly important.


Yes, we do have to kill it entirely, or not at all.  But that doesn't mean all the killings are the same.  Just as killing someone who's attacking your family with a knife isn't the same as randomly shooting a stranger, even though they're both 100% dead, killing a few cells isn't the same as killing a 8.5 month old fetus.  Both are dead, but the killings aren't equal, and we need to realize that there is a difference, and figure out just how bad the different kinds are.


Then it would be okay to kill fetuses as long as we ate them afterwards?  Would you say it's okay to kill people and eat them?  "Food" just means something you eat.  Eating something, in my opinion, doesn't make it necessarily okay to kill it.  What about mosquitos?  If a skeeter bites you, and you slap it, have you committed a crime if you don't then eat it?  I think the argument that something is "food" so it's okay to kill it is a bit weak.  Dig a bit deeper.  Why is it okay, in your view, to kill a pig, but not a person? What are the differences that make killing at eating one natural, and killing and eating the other horrible to you?

So anything that eats us is higher on the food chain than us, and should be free to kill us?  Is it okay to kill people if we then eat them?  Do you have any problem with people killing chimpanzees?  Whales?  Gorillas?  Are there any animals you don't think it's okay to kill?

Sure I can. But that doesn't change what I'm saying. I'm sure you can compare an African person versus an Asian person and see differences. I'm sure you can see differences between a woman and a man. Sure we can say there are differences, but that doesn't make them more or less human. Differences of what a human looks like doesn't make them less human. In my examples, we can point out where one is Asian, or where one is a woman, we're making statements that qualifies a person is one of the categories.


Actually, the part I'm challenging you on is your use of "real issue", and the idea that your degree of humanity is mostly useless without any way to base it from. So far the only baseline anyone has pointed out is born and not born. So people say there are degrees, and a percentage of humanness, but in the end no one seems to be able to make a clear statement on level unless it is a yes/no, or human/not human degree.

You're right that I should also make my point of where I'm coming from, but so far, I'm still working on the flaws of the arguments presented. If I can point out a problem with the system, it opens room for other systems to be presented.



I get your point, but I'm still waiting for where you can show a percentage of humanness that isn't 100% and show why it is 70%, or 80%, or 95%. So far we have 99.9%(about to be born), and 100% (born), but I just see issues with trying to explain any other percentage as it would appear relative, and killing a human yet to be born is not relative, but absolute. If we're saying it is ok to kill, we need to use absolutes.

You say the degree of humanness is the real issue, but I don't see anyway to show that is the real issue. So if you could explain more about W%, X%, Y%, Z%.


Ok, what does 25% from 75% look like?


Sure I can tell the difference. I didn't say there isn't any change. You said it's a percentage, could you give a firm percentage in your question so we can apply this gradual scale you speak of? I'm not disputing there is a difference in age. There's a difference between a 3 year old, and a 90 year old person, but neither of them are less than 100% human. So the point I'm making is I don't feel you can point out the difference between human and not human on any percentage scale. I can only see human and not human. If you can point out degrees of humanness that will give us more to discuss if there really is different percentages of humanness.



See one problem I see with that relative system is there have been millions of babies born at 5 months old, so it can't be close to 50% at 4.5 months. That cannot be a good method to determine percentage, if it can be wrong so many times.


Is killing a person at 3 years old worse or better than killing a person who's ten years old? 20 years old? 50 years old? Killing a defenseless person is considered quite terrible. A baby not yet born is very defenseless.


Killing an animal is different than a human. We kill animals because they are not human. We eat animals because of taste and nutrition. I suspect if we placed no value on human life, we would eat humans too. Human life has value, and animal life does not have that same value.

Please feel free to make your point.


You need to get out of the okay/not okay mindset.  You need to realize it's question of how bad it is, not just if it's bad.  You also need to get over the semantic argument of "humanness."  You need to get onto discussing how we can determine if its okay to kill an thing, without just using a label that everyone can't agree on.  Stick to the objective qualities that we can all agree on.  That's what I'm trying to get you to do.


No, it's not the degree of humanness that matters.  It's the actual properties that matter.  "Degree of humanness" is just sort of a short-hand, that's obviously not working for you.  So toss it out.  It's just a label too.  If you don't think it's possible to have anything other than 100% or 0% humanness, then we're just back to the issue of labels.  Let's take it to the level of objective qualities.


Do a google search, and find pictures of a 2 month fetus, and a six month fetus.  See if you can tell the difference. See if you can spot any significant, qualitative differences.  If you can, then you've just shown that we can tell a 25% developed fetus from a 75% developed one.  I really don't feel like this idea should be too controversial.  I think you're still hung up on the label aspect of it.  Let's skip the label, then, and get to objective qualities.


Okay, you don't agree with the label.  You're simply stating that you don't accept my definition, which is exactly what pro-choice people tell you.  It doesn't get us anywhere, because what we call something is an arbitrary choice.  Let's talk about objective qualities, then.


Would you be fine with a system where women were allowed to induce labor at any point during pregnancy, and then we just see if the fetus survives?  I'm assuming not.  Because those months are necessary.  Even when babies are born at 5 months, they're not fully developed.  They're not the same as a baby born after 9 months.


Depends entirely on the situation in each case.  If the 20 year old is a soldier, and you're in a war, then it's better to kill him than a 3 year old.  If the three year old is part of a siamese twin, and both twins will die unless one is removed, then it'd better better to kill the 3 year-old.  Etc.  Not all killings are equal.


Yes, but why is it different from killing a human?  What are the qualities of animals or humans that are important in that difference?


I really, really hope that you have a better reason than that.


Again, why do they have different values?  What is the cause of that difference?  Why do you value one more than the other?

I just thought of perhaps a better way to get across the point I'm trying to make.  Imagine in the future we can travel to distance stars, explore new planets, etc., and we find new types of life.  You're on a space ship that's exploring a new world, and there's some sort of problem where the food you brought with you has all gone bad, and you need to find a new source of food.  The crew have found lots of different creatures on this new planet, and suggest that you can all survive eating these animals.  There's lots of different types of animals there, how do you decide which are okay to eat, and which aren't?  Would it be okay to kill the ones that walk up to you and say "welcome to Zirton, earth-creatures?" How about the slug-like ones?  The single-celled stuff?  The ones that mud huts and hunt with sticks?  None of them are human, but some have more in common with humans than others.  Which traits are the important ones for this decision?  What questions do you want to know the answers to before you make the decision?

Right now, I'm just going over the current ones. Honestly, I don't like when we have posts that include 14 different quotes, with multiple points on a variety of ideas. It results in excessive back and forth and reading previously read details to make sure the information is accurate. I'm going to stick with the current issues first before I add more to the topic.


Why do I need to get out of the okay/not okay mindset? Even the ideas are looking at examples of killing that are okay, not okay. I understand you feel I should not look at it that way, but I don't understand why you feel that way.



I don't mind removing the percentages of humanness idea. It seemed far too difficult a premise to use, and no objective way of using it properly and consistently.


http://msnbcmedia4.msn.com/j/m...ie_vlrg_6a.widec.jpg
This picture is of a baby born after just 5 months in the womb. That's 1 month younger than your example of 6 months, and considered only 75% human in your example.

Your example doesn't work in this situation. Using percentages will not work considering that humans do not give birth at 274 days, 7 hours, and 10 minutes after conception takes place. Percentages of the average does not work, as we do not protect the average person, we protect the weakest person. For example, if you get into a car accident, and the person in the other car has a spinal condition, and they die, you can be charged with manslaughter depending on circumstances. It may not have killed a person with an average healthy spine, but we protect people on the basis of the weakest, not the fittest, or the average.

Percentages just don't work as any number you come up with will not be suitable if all, never mind most situations.


Yes, I agree. I want that too.


That's not a very good system. Medical care does not make someone less human. Otherwise, we should just allow people to not go through surgery, and see how they do with their cancer, pancreas shutting down, liver diseased, lung collapsed.

We need medical care to survive various illnesses at times, medical care does not make someone less human. Dependency does not make someone less human.

Kat brought up the point earlier that a 1 year old would not fare well on their own, so does that make them less human?


Only one quality makes someone human. Being conceived from humans. Intelligence is not important. The number of limbs is not important. The color of skin, the gender, the ability to see, taste, touch, hear, or smell doesn't make someone more or less human.


Animals are not humans.

Just doing some additional research here. A 1993 study by Dr. Joel Brind, and he found a woman who has an abortion has a 800% increase of breast cancer if they are younger than 18 at the time of abortion. It also goes on to mention that abortions increase chance of breast cancer for older women, and that if a woman does have breast cancer, and had an abortion in the past, it will result in a cancer that is more difficult to treat, and slower to recover from cancer. Multiple abortions increase breast cancer chances even further.

Did anyone else know that? Do woman get told this when they are being told about options? This report is over 15 years ago, and research should have even more now, so do other people know about complications due to abortion?

I would tend to agree that the whole 25%/75% is more than trivial to solve. It becomes very subjective. I would also have to wonder, why are we basing 100% on those three inches needed to travel, rather than based on some other statistic, such as IQ, physical development, chance of survival, etc. But if we base it on those other statistics, wouldn't that mean that we would be justified in killing premature babies?

Basically, if we agree an infant born at 10 months is 100%, and everything before that is below 100%, wouldn't that suggest that a baby born at 5 months is only 50%, and therefore eligible for abortion? Or, if we have the technology, a baby born at 1 month is a measly 10%, barely human at all?

I'm not sure legality is a good basis to fight this argument. Is legality the basis for what is right or wrong? If it were, there would be no argument. Currently, abortions are legal. They are not wrong, in the context of the law. But you obviously cannot accept this. It's a bit unfair to say that causing the death of a human is wrong because it is illegal, but then ignore the law when it obviously implies that abortion and death are, in fact, not compatable, and are separate things.

Rather, this is a moral question that falls on values, not so much law. If you think that abortion is akin to murder, you don't need the law to justify your beliefs, and you are right to seek to change it. But, morality is a rather ambigious thing, and far less objective. You will have a difficult time, for example, convincing an avid pro-choice advocate that their opinions on the matter are wrong and yours are correct, if you two don't share the same outlook on the world. I see humans cause the death of many things without appearent need of consequence, and you seem to see that that responsibility is dependant on your involvement. I find it questionable.



And if she wanted one anyways? what's the punishment? Kill her? Life imprisonment? 15 years? A fine? I find pro-life advocates seem rather hesitant to answer that one. Your example seems easy with a fetus who's "three inches" from full rights, but what about the case of one that's two weeks development? Do we wait her another 9 months? Throw her in prison for something that's barely the size of a pea? I'd say you'd have prisons full of adolescents, if that's the case.



No one is saying that it's "okay". It's just an interesting point, especially in the position of intent. Curious. You see doctors who do this sort of thing as hitmen? What would the docor's charge be in this case?



From my understanding, plenty of people actually do do that (not the leaving because they didn't want to clean the part, the walking away part). I'm not sure I think the comparison between a house and your body is very accurate. One can go without a house. One can't go without a body. One doesn't have a right to a house. People do have a right to their body. A house can be resided by many people over centries. Your body is yours, is districtively you, in an undeniable sense.



Why do you feel more responsible for a human than you do for other animals? Why do they deserve more? I think the rest of this statement specifically refers to the person that you are, and not what you have a right to do. People kill animals all the time, for various reasons, and in the first world, often times not for food or necessity. Have  you ever willingly killed an insect? Did you eat that animal afterwards? If you have, why did you do it?



I find those ideals conflicting at times. More on that later.



To be honest, in the time between the posting a couple of weeks ago and now, I've forgotten the point I was making with that. I know I had a point with it, but I just can't remember at the current moment. Sorry.



Interesting. So you think that intent plays no part in this? Alright, let me throw you a hypothetical. Say a woman who's pregnant does a risky action (let's say, riding a bike), and the worst occurs, she falls hard and the baby dies. Is this akin to manslaughter? According to our laws, on the supposition that fetus's are people, it is. She should know that the risks of biting the dust on a bike or skateboard in a manner that causes injury are pretty high, and it doesn't take much to cause a miscarrage at all. Would you agree, or disagree, with this assessment? If you agree, does that mean pregnant women should be confined to safe areas, or be charged with child abuse?



But in your own statement, you willfully admit that women do have abortions for other reasons, but I'm not allowed to mention them. What you're basically telling me is "prove that women who have abortions for comfort aren't having abortions for comfort." Or, more accurately, "excluding women who have abortions for reasons other than comfort, prove to me that there are women have abortions for reasons other than comfort." You might as well ask me to give you examples of things are round things, excluding anything that's round.

I would like to take this time, however, to point out a necessary and interesting note, however. You make no exception on rape. Because, if you are to classify it, I think it would have to be, more than necessity, abortion of a pregnancy as a result of rape is, for the most part, an abortion of convenience. And, yet, you have repeatedly in the past made an exception for them. Perhaps not all abortions of convenience are as callous as you seem to imply.



Living also has a high tendancy to result in the thing that is alive to eventually kill other creatures. But we don't seem to place much emphasis on that. It seems, by that ideology, things shouldn't have a right to live if it means there's a likely chance that they will eventually kill other organisms. Living also has a high tendancy to result in reproduction. Any woman who's alive should know that there is a chance that because she is alive, that she could get pregnant eventually.

Why should a woman be exempted on ignorance? If you didn't realise that driving drunk could kill someone, they should be excepted from the law if they do end up killing someone, right? If someone didn't know that pointing a gun at someone could eventually get them killed, they should be exempt from the results in that action if it causes injury, should they not? More to the point, if a woman has an abortion because she legitimately didn't know sex causes babies, why is the child's right to life less in this case?

If I didn't know better, katisara, I'd say that, from your writings on this matter, the only thing that makes abortion wrong is the responsibility, not the loss of life at all, or at the very least, plays a much larger role than the right to life. You don't really come off very pro-life at all, but rather pro-responsibility. Women who are knowingly take the risk are at fault of killing something, and women who didn't knowingly take the risk aren't, if I'm understanding you correctly. Why is the case any less in the latter instead of the former?



It's a false comparison, in my opinion, because in the car example, the death played no part in your intent. In the latter, it does. Having an abortion of a pregnancy that resulted from rape is the willful termination of a living organism, one that wasn't responsible for the circumstances that spawned it. It's not a tire flying off and killing someone, it's a tire flying off, then the victim, in their grief, runs off and kills someone.



I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I do agree. It's not exactly that I disagree, per say, but I'm not sure it is as you describe. I find the rules of such morality to be very difficult to answer in any such manner. And I'm not so arrogant as to suggest that I hold all the answers. Some believe there is value in all life, including non-humans, and think killing anything for any reason is wrong. Some people see no innate value in life and don't see anything wrong in killing for conveience or for bettering one's position. Others still say only human life matters. And there are some that praise all life but humans, thinking that it is our fault the world is dying, that we upset the balance maliciously, no better than a virus. Where to draw the line is a difficult choice indeed.

I'm sorry, this might seem a little strange to people to head from a pro-choice person, but I'm rather sure not all women do have an abortion thinking it's the lesser of two evils. Motivations are difference, and yes, I can see abortions for mere convenience happening. That isn't to say that's the majority, but I do see it a plausible possibility in some cases, and if it's the truth, I don't think that portrays the moral dilema that you're painting.




I'd say you're drawing a very narrow line between the two.

And I'd say you're not exactly being fair in said consequence. You're not enforcing that all people be responsible for sex. You're espousing that women be responsible for sex. I've heard no proposals from you on making men responsible. I've heard no proposals from you on making sure men suffer consequences. All I've heard is how you desire to make women suffer consequences for having sex.

Let's face it, the whole responsibilities-consequences outlook at present only punishes women, not men. Let's throw a woman in jail for not respecting her role in procreation, but let's just give men a penalty for neglecting theirs. If a woman doesn't respect a right to life of the fetus, she's a murderer. If a man doesn't, he's just a bad father. I'd say this system doesn't really make sure that there are consequences and responsibilities. Rather, it thrusts all the supposed responsibility on the mother, leaving little to nothing for negligent fathers. Do you disagree?



It almost sounds like you're contradicting yourself. Abortion isn't undoing what happened, as you state here. But a woman is owed the option to kill the resulting child. You make a point to talk about the critical differences, and the lack of intent, when you've previously stated that intent doesn't matter, that the killing of a creature is. You speack of the critical differences, but the difference remains in the case of rape as well. The sperm, egg, and embryo have no more intent, knowledge or foresight in the case of rape. In sex, however, you seem to imply that the right to life matters above convenience. But in the case of rape, convenience matters more than right to life. It's all wishy washy double standards, from what I can see, because you don't like the idea of a woman suffering consequences for something she didn't choose.



Oh, so it's not rape at all if she knew she was going to be raped, or there was a chance she was going to be raped? What if she did know there was a chance someone could try to take advantage of her? Or a chance that she could be raped? Women who are raped often know of the possibility. We're all taught in school and from certain programs to watch our drinks and be careful around strangers who make themselves too friendly (or even friends who make themselves too friendly). Is the argument now that she played a role in it, taking a chance she knew was there? If you believe so, admit it. Radical islam and many very traditional Christians sometimes thinks so. Believe it's possible that a woman invited rape upon herself and thus has responsibility.



Oh, but I do see responsibility as an important factor. You're assuming that, I, in this case, would be one to pull the plug. I'm not sure what I would do, but to be honest, I don't think I would, because it would play on my personal guilt. However, I do think I have the right to do so, even if I don't take it. I don't think only moral actions are the ones we have rights to. I think people have rights to actions I personally disagree with. For example, people have a right to be jerks to each other. I wouldn't advise it, but they have that right.

You're attributing something to me that doesn't exist. It's not that I see no value in responsibility. Rather, my emphisis on responsibility is less than yours. From my perspective, you have a very very heavy emphisis on responsbility. In fact, from my perspective, you value responsibility more than life in most of these arguments.



If find this an ironic statement from someone who basically says that killing person because of your grief from rape is the lesser of two evils from forcing said person to be encumbered with it to let that person live.

I happen to think that the right to body is an inalienable right. The law happens to disagree with me on this manner sometimes, but it's my personal belief. That doesn't mean that I agree with every expression of that right either, no more than I agree with the expression of our right to free speech to incite hatred, but I do think we have a right to it. Telling people that they don't have a right to it because I don't like it is arrogant to me, because it seems to stem from a belief that I know better than them, and frankly, I'm not comfortable with that idea. There is much about life, death, and morality that I don't understand, and I try not to be so quick to condemn.

In this particular example, the doctor abused their position, in my opinion, the trust of the woman. Much like a lawyer who commits fraud on trust, and tricks his clients into signing something over recklessly. Only this is much more personal. Is it the other person's fault? No, and if she decides that that is more important, she can decide to keep him on. However, I do think she has the right to detach herself, if she so chooses.



This is possibly a point of essential disagreement. I think they have that right, even then. You may say that legally they would not, I have no idea, but if you were to say that, I would also point out that, currently, abortions are legal as well. Inevitably, in this case, it comes as a matter of values. In your value set, the responsibility is more important. In mine, their right to their body is.
This message was last edited by the player at 05:07, Mon 27 Oct 2008.

This message was deleted by the player at 05:37, Mon 27 Oct 2008.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that this was my take on abortion. I'm rather uncertain on my feelings myself. This is what I took from Thomson's writings. Actually, she only came to one conclusion, because she didn't think it possible that someone would come to the conclusion that abortion is wrong in every case. However, that is another way around the argument. There are people who believe abortion is wrong in all cases, and if they believe so, that would get around each of those examples.

I'm not sure I agree with your percentage philosophy either, however. Specifically, because where 0 starts and 100 ends is rather difficult to say. To a degree, I think that the sperm and the egg are the starts of a new person, not the embryo. Or, rather, I see no legitimate logical reason why it starts at the zygote. Most people don't like to think that way, mostly because it holds some consequences that perhaps other people don't like. Likewise, if in the future, embyros were allowed to be taken from their host and put into a kind of incubation chamber where they can grow on independant from the body, I'm not sure your philosophy works anymore. Where's 100% then?

Ahh..the ABC hypothesis. Yes, TitL, this argument does exist, has existed for a long long time now (well, long in my years is probably different than yours). It's called, as stated, the Abortion-Breast Cancer (ABC) hypothesis.

Certain prolife organizations and researchers hold this position, and believe in it's truth, but I see it as bias more than anything. For example, that very 1993 study Dr. Brind made (very famous in this argument) did happen to find statistically significant results, but just barely. The results of the study did find that those who have had an abortion did appear to have a higher risk, but if it was 800% higher, the results would have been much much greater than just barely significantly different. His conclusion doesn't match his given results.

At any rate, it was one study. There have, in fact, been a multitude of studies in this region, and while some do have a difference, the vast majority say that there is no difference in cancer rates. This is why the major institutions on cancer research, namely the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society, have concluded, based on the availble current research, that there is no association between abortion and cancer. The scientific community, for the most part, has found evidense of the hypothesis lacking. Somehow, however, I find this won't persuade you in the least. Damn science and it's bigoted views.

I don't feel it's quite as clear cut as you state. I find it difficult to believe that two wrongs make a right. Taking away the rights of an individual because they take away the rights of someone else is a questionable principle, I find. I can understand why people follow it, but I don't think at all that it's a perfectly just way of doing things. I think this is too simple an outlook. For example, what about the case of hospital care, as I mentioned before. A person who can't afford a life saving treatment isn't entitled one. What happened to right of life there? What law did he break? It would appear that, in many cases property, or more directly, money is more important than life. Where does this fit in your diagram?



So, you don't think there should be any actual punishments if an abortion is performed? Why can't we just have a negative PR campaign for abortion then, instead of making it a law?



Interesting justification. If it's the creation of one person, it's okay to destroy if they choose to, but if it's the creation of two people, it's not, even with their consent. Are you saying that if two people created a parasite and they both wanted to kill it, they shouldn't be allowed to? How about clones? Could a woman kill a clone of herself if she made it?



Not true. There are examples of animals doing this. For example, lions will often kill of their unborn when a new pride leader takes over. I've heard some monkeys and wolves will do it as well. Interestingly, you hear about these more in the intelligent animals than you do in the non-intelligent ones, seemingly infering that they do it because they know it, not because of ignorance.



I will overlook this time because you're relatively new here, but for future reference, there's few things that will irritate my faster than someone else telling me what I believe when I never said anything to the point. I cannot speak for others who are pro-choice, but I personally am pro-choice because I am pro-choice.

There seems to be some personal slights to my character a few times in this debate, so let me clarify something for you. I don't approve of abortion. I don't like the concept. I've never had an abortion. I don't think I ever will, unless my views drastically change or there's something about me in this nature that I don't understand. It's simply not how I value things. So, if I end up pregnant, even if it results in an early end for my college career, I don't think I will end it prematurely, and I don't even think I'll give it away. It's simply not what I was raised to do.

However, that is "my" choice, based on "my" beliefs. And I feel, given this is such a complex, personal, and convoluted issue, that people should be allowed to make their choices based on their beliefs. I'm not so arrogant as believe that everyone should follow my values, that I know better than them when it comes to such complicated matters. No one should be punished for not having my values. And, especially given this is so heavily tied into religion, this is more personal than not, I feel. I'm against any religious institution legislating for me or anyone else to follow their belief structure, and frankly, I see that happening in many of the cases for pro-life. I was given a choice, and I've chosen it thusfar not to accept abortion for myself. I feel everyone should be entitled the same choice, even if it means that they may choose something I disagree with.



Oh? So, if they wrecklessly get a girl pregnant, what responsibility do they have, under your argument? Your position seems to be to make the woman have it, no matter what the choice is. What's their responsibility? A check? A small payment of support a month? That sure sounds like a fair distribution of responsibility. You said it yourself earlier, it takes a man and woman to make a child. Unfortunately, the position you seem to advocate seems to be making the woman take the vast majority of the responsibility, and the man's very little in comparison.

Unless, you are going to institute a law that states that a biological father must be with his unborn child's mother in all cases, appointments, costs, etc. That as much as she's burdened with this, he must be too. Then I could buy the responsibility argument. As is, however, you're just telling women to bear the responsibility, giving her no choice in the matter, and telling men that they can be involved to a level of their choosing. I think the biggest lesson from this position is "don't be born female".



Interesting. You seemed to have a bad reaction to this question. The parasite examples were hypotheticals as well, but you didn't seem to mind them. Why is this time a problem?

The fact is, though, we're all making hypotheticals. You're assuming the hypothetical position that your views are correct, that the fetus is a person and killing a person is almost always wrong. According to law, which is the closest thing we have to objectivity at the moment, it isn't. That's why women aren't charged with manslaughter after abortion, because the law doesn't view it as the same kind of act at all. After that, however, like on matters of whether it should be or not, it's all placed on personal values. So, if we're going to throw out what ifs, why are your what ifs better than mine?



Alright, but I would just like to know that if it's still a matter of responsibility, the position that rape victims still shouldn't be allowed to abort compromises that position, right? After all, what did she do to take this responsibility? Live? Keep herself healthy? Be female? If this is as you state it is, then the personal responsibility argument isn't really worth that much, at least that's how I see it.



Now this is funny. You just made the implication that personal responsibility isn't the key factor in why abortion is wrong, then here you make the personal responsibility argument. Technically, every moment we females are alive there's a chance we could become pregnant. After all, we're going on the assumption that someone didn't have sex with us in our sleep, or release their seed on our underwear this morning. Or that divine intervention doesn't occur, and we become virgin mothers. So the chance is out there, just slim.

I suppose the answer to not being pregnant is simply not to be a living female who's fertile. Oh, no, wait...doesn't the bible have a case of a post-menopausal woman becoming pregnant, as evidensed by the conception of Issac? I suppose that means that the only sure way not to become pregnant is to not be a female.

Again, I have to question the personal responsibility of men in these cases. Where's the lesson of responsibility here?



As Jesus would, right?



Again, you use the responsibility angle. What exactly was the woman who got pregnant from rape responsible for? Oh, right. Being female.

I'm surprised you object to this. Why? Does the man not have a right to life? I expect the objection from katisara, because he seems to believe that responsibility overweighs right to life (at least, that's my impression). You, however, don't think abortion is acceptable even in the case of rape. Are you saying that the person in this case doesn't have a right to your body?



Okay. There are differences. However, this is still the life of an innocent man, right? In that sense, is it any different? Why is my example different from rape in that sense? You object in that case, why wouldn't you in this one?
This message was last edited by the player at 06:52, Mon 27 Oct 2008.

I know you don't understand, that's why I keep trying to get you to think about it.  The reason you need to get out of the binary mindset is because it's limiting your view of the problem artificially.  Reality isn't a binary situation, but your trying to force it into a binary model.  It's like trying to count how many cars of each color are on the road, but only being allowed to describe them as red or blue.  You can do it, you can get some result like 75% of cars are blue, and the other 25% are red, but it doesn't really reflect reality, because in the real world, there's lots more colors than that.  Artificially imposing the assumption that all cars are either red or blue results in a lose of information.  It results in you saying that a yellow car is the same color as a green car, etc.  Likewise, if you look at things through an imposed 100%/0% assumption, then you end up with incorrect views like two things that are clearly qualitatively different are exactly the same.


Yeah, that description doesn't seem to have worked well for anyone.  And it did suffer the same problem of being an arbitrary label, even if it didn't suffer the binary problem.  So, instead of talking about "percentage human," lets move on to objective qualities instead.  Without using any "percentage human" values, including 0% and 100% (note that saying something is human is the same as saying it's 100% human), which we don't seem to be able to agree on, tell us what it is about fetuses that makes you think it's never, under any circumstance acceptable to kill them?  What are the objective qualities, as opposed to just a label, that we should be considering?


And what is the likelihood of survival for a baby born at 6 months?  What is the likelihood of severe disabilities, or other problems?  Now, imagine you're a doctor at a very understaffed hospital, where there are two emergencies, at the same time, and you're the only one who can attend to them.  One is a baby just born at 6 months, who needs a surgery, the other is a baby born after nine months, who also needs a surgery.  Both are, as far as you can tell, not going to live through the night without the surgery, but whichever gets the surgery will be just as likely to have a normal life as any other 6-month or 9-month baby (ie, the 6-month baby has a much worse prospect).  Which do you choose to treat?  Is it a complete coin toss, or do you save the 9 month baby because it's more likely to survive in the long run?  If you can honestly say you'd just flip a coin, then we just have different views on how to make those decisions, and that's fair enough.  If you think it's possible the pick one over the other, even though you consider them both 100% human, then you can hopefully start to see what I'm talking about.  It's not an issue of saying "it's okay to let that one die, it's only 6 months and not a human," but rather it's an issue of saying "it's worse to let the 9 month old die, because it has a better chance of having a good life."  If you can see it as a better/worse issue, rather than a okay/not-okay issue, then you'll start to see where I'm coming from.


Again, because you're stuck on the human/not-human issue, you don't realize that letting someone die in one case isn't the same as letting them die in another.  If you have one heart that someone has donated after they died, and two people who need it, but one is 10 years old, and the other 95, which do you give it to?  I would give it to the 10 year old.  Not because it's 100% to let 95 year olds die when you have a chance to save them, but because it's better to let a 95 year old die than let a 10 year old die.  It's not that ones 100% okay, and the other is 100% not okay.  It's that you can compare their relative badness, and decide which is worse than the other.  In a binary system, you can't compare things like that, because there's no better or worse, only yes or no.


No, but it is something that needs to be considered when making decisions that might affect their survival.


So an intelligent alien, which could speak with us, feel the same emotions as us, do everything that a human does, but didn't happen to be human (think pretty much any of the aliens for star trek, if you're into that show), can be killed at will with no guilt at all?  How about the death penalty?  That's killing a 100% human, but I believe you consider that to be acceptable?  If so, then clearly just being human isn't sufficient reason by itself that something shouldn't be killed.  It's not the only factor to consider.  What other factors need to be weighed?




Your argument is circular: animals are different from humans because they have different value, and they have different value because they're not human.  You have to either state what it is that makes us human, and then argue why we value that, or state what qualities we value, and show that humans have them and animals don't.  You should be able to do this, it's not a trick question.  You may not have thought about it before, and have always just accepted it as "the way things are."  Most people are probably in that position, really.  But thinking about it deeper is a good thing.  Asking why that's the way things are is a good thing.  Dig deeper, TitL, and figure out why you value things that are human.

The two are related. We make some things illegal because they are wrong, theft or animal abuse, for instance. In fact the basis of US law, the Constitution, was built on moral grounds. Of course, there are a good many laws which are not based on moral grounds (speeding) and a good many moral activities which have no representation in law (adultery, in some states. Or painting your house a garish color.) The two are not completely equivalent, and at times the law has supported distinctly immoral things (such as slavery), but it at least gives us an agreed upon basis to build off of.

I think it would be hard to find a non-medieval moral code which feels that property or convenience is on the same level as a life (although I'm open to it). Meanwhile, I can find a good number of moral codes which seem to proclaim the opposite. Even Islam, which at times has been considered brutal, makes it clear the punishment for theft is cutting off a hand, and death doesn't follow until several offenses.



I don't think I ever said that. I think we both agree, causing the death of a human, and denying a human his time, property, future, etc. are both morally wrong. However, I'm looking for a way to compare them. Most people seem to accept that life trumps property, time, etc. and I gave evidence for it - in most democratic nations, this is enforced and not even worth debate. You are welcome to give counter-evidence, otherwise I think it's safe to assume that life DOES trump property and time.




You feel I am responsible for things I wasn't involved in? I was perhaps responsible for OJ killing his wife, or for Manson trying to start a race war?



If a woman decided to kill a fetus at 10 months, I think the punishment should be the same as if she decided to kill a newborn baby. Again, they are basically identical, biologically speaking. To use Tycho's terms, it's 100% human (at least if a newborn is, I'm not so sure about that myself).



If she JUST became aware of it? No, I think that would be excessive for a few reasons. For one, biologically, at two weeks development, the creature is still an embryo. It has no brain activity, no heart activity. It is not, biologically speaking, independently alive. There are few, if any cells in there which are the final cells it will be born with. The woman has had little or no time to consider her options. She hasn't "sat on it" for months and months. I would consider a first trimester abortion one that should carry few, if any legal repurcussions.  (Note, I may not have thought this last week. Unfortunately, with so much time between your posts, I regularly forget my arguments, so I sort of have to remember them as I go along.)




In cases where they are legally protected, probably on the order of $200-$500. There's little danger to himself, physically or legally. If we legalized assassination, we'd probably find the actual cost to kill someone who is unable to defend himself and good enough to make appointments would run about the same, if not less (you don't generally need a medical degree to kill someone). If abortion were made illegal, the cost would likely go up, to represent his financial and legal risk, and if the mother didn't come in for an appointment, but if instead she had to be captured and aborted against her will, the cost would probably be in the area of $20,000 or more, I have to guess, so still comparable (but then again, I'm just making that number up, so maybe it would be higher. Certainly not lower.)

Or am I missing the point of your question?



Yes, and they pay a significant legal consequence for that. They are generally not able to buy a house again in the future, or at least for a very long time. People also kill their wives rather than file for a divorce. That doesn't mean it should be without legal repurcussions.



If the pregnancy were such that it would be considered a serious possibility of your going without a body as a result, I think abortion would be considered an acceptable option. Since, after the vast majority of pregnancies, the body still functions properly and is in the possession of the original owners (I'm not counting voodoo pregnancies here, I suppose), I don't see the point.



Humans are sensing, self-aware creatures, capable of greater knowledge and understanding than other animals. They also don't taste as good. I think it's unethical to kill apes, except in cases of pressing need.  In fact, I could be convinced that it is more ethical to kill a newborn than it is to kill an adult chimpanzee. But I also recognize the value of a creature's future is important. I consider my four-year-old more valuable than an adult chimpanzee because, while he is not as smart, and perhaps only slightly less smelly, one day he will most likely achieve something a great deal more impressive than that chimpanzee. Similarly with my two-year-old, although slightly less so (since his current awareness and therefore his present "value" is lower).



Yes, generally because it poses a threat to my health (mosquitos).



Sometimes



It's sort of an eye for an eye thing. You bite me, I bite you. I stopped when I remembered that they sometimes carry other peoples' blood too, since that's sort of gross. I also don't eat cockroaches for health reasons, or ants when I used poison on them. Otherwise they're fair game.



It's okay, I do that all the time too. Maybe I should start using the scratchpad more.






Oh, I think intent completely plays a part in this.



If she were truly, completely reckless, yes. Like if she decided she wanted to take up stair tumbling, when there's a pretty high likelihood of causing harm. If she was just riding her bike, which is generally considered safe for most people, probably not. Just like living in an apartment, even though every year children climb up and fall out of windows, wouldn't be manslaughter because it isn't especially reckless.

But then again, maybe a better legal definition of reckless is necessary.

I think if she were 9-months pregnant and took up bungee cord jumping, that would probably be manslaughter (although the sentence would be diminished, most likely).




I'm only trying to exclude abortions for medical necessity. For the sake of argument, I'll concede that abortions out of medical necessity are in fact necessary and while lamentable, are not morally wrong (or at least, are the lesser of two evils). I'm saying those abortions which are NOT for medical necessity are for convenience (not comfort, convenience).




That is true. And I think that comes back to the front end of it.

I think my argument boils down to this;
Abortions are terrible things, and should be avoided whenever feasible. An abortion becomes more allowable given certain factors:
The mother is not responsible for the abortion (lacking foresight, intent or knowledge)
For some reason, the mother cannot safely complete the pregnancy (medical necessity)
(optional) The fetus is not yet developed enough, or is unable to develop to the point of being considered human

On the flip side, a woman is fully responsible for committing, or having lead to the death of her fetus if:
She, with knowledge, foresight and intent, engaged in behavior to kill the fetus. As these three factors are reduced, so is her culpability, and her legal culpability should be lower, but absolutely not higher, than her moral culpability.

Do I think it is less moral to kill a fetus at 10 months than at 2? Yes, but I'd have to consider more. It would probably come back to Tycho's argument, basically, based on biological flags and baselines. Does that mean it should be completely legal to abort at 2 months? Not sure yet.



Yes, it's called "eating" :) As long as we feed on lesser animals, I don't see it as a problem. My rabbits don't write sonnets or give themselves names. They mostly just eat, poop and jump at shadows. Not all life is created equal.



I don't know of any woman who has gotten pregnant solely by virtue of being alive.



You're making a moral statement based on laws. The laws don't accept ignorance because then it becomes legally preferable to remain ignorant. The current legal situation does incentivize educating yourself. We can't really incentivize morals, so that argument doesn't apply.

Now, if someone did not realize that drinking reduces his reaction time, and went out and killed someone drunk driving, only now realizing why he got into a crash, yes, I'd say that morally he has reduced responsibility. He's pretty stupid, but morally he's not as bad as the guy who realized what alcohol does to a person. Even moreso, a person who drinks alcohol without realizing it (someone spiked the punch) and therefore has no knowledge that he is drunk has even less culpability.



If my four-year-old didn't realize a gun goes bang and shot me, yes, he'd have reduced culpability.



You can answer that question yourself :) Because we can argue that a woman's right to her body is reduced when she intentionally engages in behavior which may result in certain reactions she doesn't ultimately desire, but we can't say her right is reduced when these reactions start without her making that first compromise.

In other words, a woman does have a right to control over her body, perhaps even that right is equal to the right the fetus has to life. HOWEVER, her right to control over her body is REDUCED when she engages in behaviors with certain known side effects, while the right of the fetus to life maintains the same level. If her right to her body is reduced because of her irresponsible decisions, that means it is now below the right the fetus has to live. If her right to her body is not reduced, than they are equal and we go back to the previous debates.

I suppose, in short, "the person responsible for the situation is responsible for setting it right". If no one is responsible, it shakes out differently.



I'm trying it on for size. Not sure yet if I like it.



In both cases the abortion is equally tragic and terrible. However, in the former, the woman is the one who created the situation, and so it falls onto her (and her male co-conspirator) to set it right, not onto the fetus. In the latter, the woman literally did find herself in the situation, and so has equal responsibility for it occuring as the fetus (i.e. - none).





If your only concern is motivation, I can live with that and move on. I'm simply trying to say that if we could all be happy without an abortion ever being necessary (if, for instance, we could take out the fetus or embryo and grow it perfectly in an incubator), that that would be the preferable solution. That abortions are not "good" things by any stretch of the imagination.

Do you feel that in some cases, an abortion is inherently good, or morally neutral? Or is it always naturally an undesirable situation?



Which isn't surprising, since punishment is a subset of consequences. Punishment is the practice of imposing (by an outside party with intent) something unpleasant or aversive on a person or animal, usually in response to disobedient or morally wrong behavior; a penalty inflicted for an offense, fault, etc. (from wikipedia and American Heritage).

Pregnancy is not a punishment, unless you believe God and a literal reading of Genesis. It's a natural consequence. Dropping a jar of pickles on my foot isn't a punishment because there's no outside force who puts it on me. Giving or not giving an abortion could hypothetically be a punishment, if we said we are enforcing it based on whether an initial behavior is wrong, offensive, etc., but that isn't what we're saying. If I damage someone's house, my paying for it isn't so much a punishment (meant to be a penalty against me), but a recompense (meant to make his house right). Only if I'm charged something above and beyond what is required to make the situation right is it a punishment.

From what I've been trying to argue, birthing the baby is what is required to make the situation right, since it only temporarily denies the rights of one person, and only the person who is responsible for the situation in the first place. It is recompense. Punishment would be if the mother had to do something else above and beyond getting the fetus to the point where it can be cared for properly outside of the womb, which I'm not suggesting.



I've been trying to, when I remember, but it gets very complex to write out "the woman and the man..." every time. You can assume that, when I talk about the woman going through this, the man is also responsible to some degree, to help drive her to appointments, to make up for lost income, to help buy groceries, whatever. Since the woman's job is pretty clear cut and the man's is not, however, it becomes more fuzzy (especially in cases where there's no real relationship between the man and the woman). At absolute minimum, the man is responsible for financial assistance to help the woman through this very difficult time. If the man could help by giving birth or donating blood or whatever, he should be there too. The responsibility lies with him just as much. But nature does not allow for that, so he will simply have to assist in every other way possible.



I don't think I ever said that, and in fact, it's a little offensive that you're accusing me of such. However, the woman is where all the action is, frankly. A woman can get an abortion, a man cannot. If you'd rather argue about whether it is ethical for men to get abortions, we can do that, but I think it'll be a very short conversation. A man who pays for, drives to, consents to, encourages, etc. an abortion is JUST as responsible as the woman involved, but I find it difficult to imagine a situation where the woman is LESS responsible (since ultimately, she too has to consent) unless she's bound and gagged (which I believe we all agree is morally wrong, even though in theory a man too has a right to request an abortion, regardless as to the mother's feelings on the matter.)



I'm pretty sure I said intent does matter. In this case, the woman has almost no responsibility, therefore we can't rightly ask her to forego her other rights to correct the situation.

Again, if you willingly engage in behavior, YOU are responsible for fixing what results. If you do NOT willingly engage in behavior, you are NOT responsible for repairing what results.




I didn't say that either, and your strawmen are getting old.

I would say, however, that if I told you "hey, behind that door is an S&M rape club. Don't go in there, because they like the kinky stuff and don't believe in safe words, and won't ask permission. You see? There's even a sign on the door saying do not enter, rapists here." And you unlocked the door and entered, yes, I would say you share some responsibility for what resulted (still far, far less than the rapist, of course). But women rarely, if ever do that, at least without suffering some mental derangement of their own which would in turn reduce their culpability.

A lot of this also relies on measuring risks and percentage chances. You will almost never find a situation with a double digit percent chance of getting raped. The odds are real, but fairly low. That is generally considered an acceptable risk, as in the woman has done what is necessary to address the risk. So, aside from works of fiction and cases where the woman does not have true choice in the matter (through slavery, financial dependence, mental coercion, etc., etc.) a woman basically never "chooses" rape. If she did, it wouldn't be rape any more, it would just be really rough but consensual sex.



I'm really not trying to argue personal beliefs here. Not to say I don't care, but your personal beliefs are irrelevant, except insofar as you may or may not be trying to force them on someone else. You seem to feel it is acceptable for someone to pull the plug, and that's all I need to know, even if you, personally, never would.



Again, I'm not arguing what Vexen thinks is appropriate and necessary for Vexen. I'm arguing what Vexen thinks is necessary and appropriate for Jane Shmoe. When I say "you don't believe", "you don't think", whatever, it isn't your personal ethics, but what you feel is universal enough to apply to every man and woman in the US.



I think, when comparing between two heavy rights, responsibility is a good way to determine which trumps. It's a measure of who needs to care for whom, not whi has more rights.



But you didn't answer the question.

(And I didn't say that. What I am trying to say is, I have no idea, really, and I'm not going to argue it either way, however let's assume it is so we can focus on the cases where my argument does apply.)



Even though the doctor told her there are risks, including death? What else should he tell her? "Yes, the risk of this experiment really, really does include death and genital warts, really, really, I'm not kidding!!! And you might end up hooked to a fat guy for ten months!!! Really, THIS EXACT TEST runs those risks!!! Do you still want to sign up?"



Again then, I would like you to answer the question about the rope.

It sounds to me like it's okay for me to say "yes, yes, I will take care of you. I voluntarily accept this risk. You can put your life on the line for me." Then, when the rubber hits the road I can stand up and run away laughing, "hahaha, psych! Loser!" And watch as the guy dies on the operating table. You seriously think that's morally acceptable? I find that idea morally repugnant, and absolutely unacceptable.

Yeah, it seems the percentage idea isn't working for people, and I now realize that while it's a better description, it's just another version of the "human/not human" concept, rather than something more objective.  Instead of X% human, I think we need to look at the specific traits/qualities, and weigh those up when making the decision.  People probably won't be able to agree on 50% human anymore than they can agree on 0% or 100%, but they should be able to agree on this like degree of awareness, complexity of nervous system, likelihood of survival if removed from womb right now, etc.

Katisara seems to have picked up on what I'm getting at when he talks about the value of chimpanzees vs. that of his kids.  Those are the kinds of thoughts I think we should be exploring, because he's talking about real-world properties that we can all agree on, like self-awareness, sensing, potential for future state, etc.

Just to be clear to everyone, I'm not claiming to have the final answer to this, I'm just suggesting that we might be able to find more agreement if we look at these objective qualities, rather than arguing over whether one arbitrary label applies or not.

Legality defines four types of issues:

1- Legality puts a floor on what is socially acceptable behavior.  In other words, it defines the lowest acceptable morality in our society (the lowest common denominator), even though it doesn't promote it.  (For example, smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol).  This is what we call the "social contract" of society.

2- Based on the theory of "natural law," the law tries to define what is absolutely wrong or right (such as murder).  Usually, this coincides with #1 because people won't tolerate it, but sometimes people would tolerate it.

3- Laws address the "positive law" which refers to things that are not individually right or wrong but are necessary laws to fulfill a public policy.  (Example:  Paying your taxes -- because revenue is required to run the country -- or speed limits -- based on the underlying principle of safety.)

4- Laws address certain public policies that it wants to promote or regulate in a manner with a positive outcome for the public good.  (Many family laws fall under this category, the national defense might fall under here, mortgage tax deductions fall here--to encourage people to be homeowners and positively impact the economy, etc.)

I suggest reading Beccaria if you want to know a lot about legal theories, particularly relating to crime and punishment.

___

The key factor here is whether the right to privacy and choice of action with one's body outweighs the value/sanctity of the life within the body.  The supreme court essentially said that at a certain point, the child's life outweighs the personal rights of the mother.  That's where there's disagreement.  Science cannot say when a human life begins, so obviously the conservatives believe it is better to be safe than sorry (particularly the religiously devout).  The other side says "it's my body," which I think is a terrible saying, since it's really the body inside your body we're talking about.

Once we successfully develop a uterine replicator and the technology to safely transfer a fetus from a womb to a replicator, we will obviate the abortion issue.
I'm looking forward to that day.

Heh!  I've been re-reading Brave New World recently, so that idea is quite timely for me!

The Vorkosigan series has some wonderful discussion of uterine replicators as well.
I'm very much in favor.

Saw this today and it gave me a good laugh!

http://www.theonion.com/conten...utm_source=a-section

It sort of reminded of katisara talking about how he likes to have the teaching of the catholic church, so he doesn't have to rely on his own interpretation of prayer in moments of extreme stress.  Sadly for the pope, he has to take his own interpretation of prayers into account! ;)

It's April 1st every day on the Onion >_<, made me go "that can't be right" while I looked up further information. :P

Humans are no better than other animals. Abortion is okay by me.

Animals are delicious.

Donner, Party of 47 *hands out the menus* :P
This message was last edited by the player at 01:10, Thu 09 Apr 2009.

Good point. So cannibalism is okay?

Only if you're a good cook.

The Stomach has no moral dilemma if you're hungry enough.  Besides, they're in a better place now :P

Let me expand - are you okay with my KILLING and eating people?

Nope; I wouldn't eat a hamburger either if I had to kill the cow myself, though.
This message was last edited by the player at 14:22, Thu 09 Apr 2009.

So it's okay to hire someone else to kill people for you to eat.

Would money really matter to people when it gets to the point of eating each other to survive?

On a grim addendum, have you ever read the short story "Survivor Type" by Stephen King? (most commonly found in the Skeleton Crew Anthology)

In all seriousness -- killing a human being is serious business, and is often morally wrong or at least questionable.  But, once dead, a human corpse is just meat.  I have no problem with eating it as long as I'm not violating any other rule by doing so (property, etc).

I was specifically hoping the Monk would answer, since he seemed to imply humans and animals are of equivalent value (and the implication that owning, hurting or killing either is equally fine).

Of course, most people don't hold this assumption, so the comparison he made in regards to abortion does not hold.

Humans are technically animals, but we don't hold all animals equal (or legal to own).

As follow-up on the Cannibalism, I would be as likely to eat my cat or dog as I would a Human.

Some people eat cats and dogs.  Some people eat humans.  I wouldn't eat either unless desperate need brought out its inevitability.  I wouldn't want to order either cat, dog, or human meat, as I'm much more preferring of beef, poultry,  seafood, and pork.
This message was last edited by the player at 16:21, Thu 09 Apr 2009.

Humans and animals are equivalent. I think you should be somewhat pragmatic about bumping off either. My understand is that killing people for food is not the best choice with regards to nutrition AND society will probably come down on you like a sack of bricks. Probably better grabbing a burger.

Hurting animals is, in my opinion, less necessary than hurting people. Animals rarely have valuable information that you can beat out of them.

Owning people is illegal. I don't own animals nor people. I'll evaluate my feelings on owning people or animals but I'll tentatively start with: what the hell for?

I own rabbits because they are a good source of protein and good food for my family.

I used to own chickens because it was educational for me, and I rescued them from a dangerous situation.

I own cats because they bring me comfort and I rescued them from dangerous homes.


TheMonk - do you eat meat? Do you drink soda? Do you not eat people because they are too expensive? Do you believe murder is wrong primarily because of an intrinsic value of society? I simply don't understand how you are making your ethical judgments.

I've eaten as many different kinds of meat as I've had access to.  If cat, dog, or human was an available option, I'd choose that over other available foods.

Meat? Yes. Soda? No.

I don't eat people because of two reasons:
1)Poor nutritional value, I understand.
2)Too expensive (the jail time wouldn't be worth it).

I don't believe that murdering people is necessarily wrong. Suffering the consequences might be beyond the value of a given murder, but that's a societal judgement.

Do I believe in indiscriminate murder? No. Who would raise the cows I eat, or build my car?

Ethical? Pragmatic. World's overpopulated anyway.

LDS, buddhist, theist, zen, hippy, bastard, I'm pretty sure killing people to eat them is contrary to about five out of six of those (although killing animals to eat them is contrary to one).However, I'll grant you, I can't really make a case as to why abortion is wrong against the moral standard that killing people is okay as long as it doesn't cost you.

Nah, only four out of six.  Killing people to eat them would not automatically or necessarily go against theism or bastardism.

Tell ya what: I'll rotate to buddhist next topic.

I differentiate between murder and killing as well. One is planned.

Killing is often done in self-defense and is frequently acceptable under those conditions.

Murder is the intentional, illegal killing of a person.

Your clarification does nothing in regards to killing for food, since that is always planned (and, ergo, always murder, by your definition). So I will note again, you seem to be saying that murder is of little, if any moral cost.

I disagree. I don't specifically plan to kill Bob the antelope... any antelope will do. Or deer, or whatever. I'm in it for the food. I'm prepared to kill, but a lack of definite target means that I don't plan it and thus don't murder.

I don't believe that all instances of murder are wrong.

Your notion that murder requires a plan on a specific person does not match up with either the casual or legal definitions.  If you went out looking for a human to kill, for food or any other purpose, the result would be murder whether you had a specific person in mind or not.
Again, murder is the intentional, illegal killing of a person.  There are four elements there:
1)  Intent.  This doesn't require a plan; it just requires an affirmative and deliberate action.  Note that if the act is done suddenly in a fit of emotion and without thinking, we may consider this element negated or mitigated (and instead of murder we call it "voluntary manslaughter").
2)  Killing.  We're all clear on this one.
3)  Illegal.  This means the killing occurs in a situation where killing is not permitted.  Killing may be authorized (war, capital punishment, etc.), or the actions of the person may essentially forfeit their right not to be killed (self-defense situations, human sacrifice, etc.).
4)  Person.  What is being killed must have personhood, however that is defined.  This may or may not have a relationship with number 3 -- in other words, there may be a conceptual connection between "personhood" and "the right to not be killed".  If you come over and kill my dog because you're mad at me, we don't call it murder.

Then it is impossible to murder an animal for food or sport.

I recognize that the legal definition of murder is different from my own, but it is my definition.

The definition you present doesn't allow for a wrong/right dichotomy either. Actually, I find that your definition of murder is unsatisfactory in that it lacks the "forethought" element that used to be there. I recognize that's why we have "degrees" of murder, but it doesn't help me in casual conversation.

There was never a "forethought" element there.  Murder requires intent -- which, in many cases implies forethought.  But the idea that you have to sit down and decide to murder this one person and then go out and do it, doesn't fit with either a common understanding of murder (where the Columbine folks are murderers, for example) or a legal understanding of murder.

Webster's says:
Murder: to kill (a human being) unlawfully and with premeditated malice.

But let's back up a little further: what is the key difference between murder and killing with regards to human beings?

"Murder is wrong".  This seems to do okay.

Sticking with my definition above, two elements: 1) intent, 2) legality.

Though really, in a world where people were publicly selling "Long Pork" on the open market, it would be a world where certain forms of murder were no longer illegal, and thus no longer murder in the eyes of the law.

Obviously the difference would be that you would be able to lose your "Personhood", whether by birth or by result of some crime or unpaid debt.
(ex. "I hereby sentence you to death by Butchering")

I'll toss legality out the window for my definition. I feel it contains no relevence.

As for intent, I believe that is why the legal system uses "degrees," as I said before. I feel that planning clearly demonstrates intent and removes any necessity for me to use "degrees" in casual context, which is good because I won't do it. This way I don't have to determine intent from anything that might be subjective.

I feel my definition is clear and simple.


What about political assassinations? Are they wrong in all instances?

If political assassinations constitute murder, then yes.

Then you and I disagree firmly with regards to murder. Your firmness and insistance are respectable.

So, to get back to abortion, is a fetus a human being in your opinion?

The evidence that a fetus is a human being is clear and overwhelming.
The interesting question is whether a fetus is a person.  I say yes.

What behaviors or characteristics constitute "person?"

I'm unsure.

Why then are you certain that a fetus is a person?

False assumption: my level of certainty with regard to this issue is below "certain".
Although I'm unsure about what behaviors or characteristics constitute a "person", I'm convinced that whatever net we cast that is wide enough to catch "obvious persons" will also catch the fetus.
This message was last edited by the player at 18:53, Fri 10 Apr 2009.

Characters on the stage of life.

Fetuses are plot devices.

The majority of people are plot devices, actually.  Only a select few are characters.

People: Those entities capable of touching the earth without reaching through any portion of another human being.

That makes it pretty easy for me to violate the rights of whomever I want, then -- I just throw them in a concrete room.  Or, heck, pick them up off the ground and hold them over my head.
Any chance you'll try a REAL definition?

To put it another way, we compare the fetus to the following groups which are persons: newborn babies, the severely physically disabled, the comatose, conjoined twins, incarcerated prisoners.
I've not found any definition of "person" that includes all of the preceding and excludes fetuses, unless the definition is crafted specifically and solely to exclude fetuses (rather than being rationally crafted based on some trait these groups have that fetuses do not).
This message was last edited by the player at 19:47, Fri 10 Apr 2009.

The definition I used regarding people as characters (originally "actors") was paraphrased from Shakespeare and not crafted specifically to exclude fetuses. It was rather poetic, so I understand that you might want a more rigorous definition.

While staring at the definition for people I noticed the word "human" and went to check that definition out.

The definition included "bipedal upright mammal" as part of it.

I submit to you that you have to have the qualities of a mammal and at least have the potential to be bipedal and upright in order to be a person.

This does not exclude a fetus, which is bipedal and spends a good portion of its development upright.
It does, however, exclude paraplegics and amputees, does it not?
And, if you claim that a fetus does not have the potential to be upright, this definition also excludes newborn babies, does it not?
Finally, I would ask -- what is it about the qualities of "mammal", "bipedal", and "upright" make them reasonable limitations for personhood?  If R2D2 existed, should it not be condidered a person?  How about a fully sentient race of lizards?
This message was last edited by the player at 21:23, Fri 10 Apr 2009.

A fetus stands on two feet? Really?



Yeah.  Yeah, I think it does, assuming that I was making that claim.



R2D2 is a droid, not a person. Sentient lizards would likely have developed a race descriptor independent of our own. They would still not be people according to the definition in Webster's. Now, which one of those could we murder?

I'm not trying to take an adversarial role, just to clarify. I'm honestly interested in understanding your perspective. Webster had a definition for human that struck me as fairly reasonable.

There are some that might argue that fetus's don't have the qualities of mammal at conception, and only achieve it after a time. They would probably site gills, nerve clusters instead of fully developed eyes, the inability to lactate (if gender is determinable) and other non-mammalian traits.

If you read the definition in the same way that you read "bipedal" and "upright", I think you'd rule out fetus's as humans at this point, but I feel that you are capable of better in defending your own point of view within the framework.

The definition is "bipedal, upright, and mammal." The argument is that at various points in development fetus's don't have all mammalian traits. Your response?

Ontogony does not recapitulate phylogeny.  At no point in development do fetuses have gills; that was an old fiction dispelled decades ago.
You're basing your definition of "person" on a definition of "human", and I think that's a mistake.  First of all, because fetuses ARE biologically human, as any first-year medical text book or competent biology student will tell you.  And second, because as I pointed out earlier, should other sentient creatures manifest, they should probably be given personhood as well.
You didn't address the other problems with the "upright, bipedal, mammal" definition of a person -- namely, the status of paraplegics and amputees, newborns, and the comatose.   Nor have you given any reason why the conveyance of rights and personhood has any relation to these factors.  What is it about being upright, bipedal, and or mammalian that should imply personhood?

Do keep in mind, there's a difference between a 'person' and a 'human'. Human refers to the species - homo sapiens sapiens, and qualities thereof. A droid is not a human because it is not, biologically, of that species. A fetus, however, is.

A person is a self-governing individual with intelligence and understanding. A fetus is not a person, because the fetus does not have self-governance or intelligence (yet), nor is a newborn or a rabbit or a dog. A droid MAY BE a 'person' if it is sufficiently intelligent.

There's a few new faces since the last time we went over this, so I'll go over my position again.

The whole person/not-a-person debate is a red herring.  If we have to debate whether a fetus is a person or not, then the traits of what it means to be a "person" aren't clear enough to use the result as a reason for killing or not killing it.  Saying "it's wrong to kill people" is only something that works if we can agree on what "people" are, in other words.  Instead of focusing on the issue of whether or not it's a person, we should be asking "what is it about 'persons' that we find makes it wrong to kill them?  Do fetuses have those qualities?"  It's possible that even if it's not a person, it'd be wrong to kill it, and arguably that even if it is a person that it'd be okay to kill it (as many people feel it's okay to kill humans in certain situations).  So, basically, I'd say the proper arguments would be more along the lines of "a fetus has traits X, Y, and Z, and it's wrong to kill any creature with those traits" or "a fetus lacks traits A, B, and C, and we consider okay to kill things that don't have those traits."

Also, I would propose that both sides in the debate are looking for a switch, when what's really there is a dial.  Both sides want to say there is on magical instant, before which the fetus is 0% human, and thus completely okay to kill, and after which it's 100% a human being, and not at all okay to kill.  The pro choice side says that magical instant is birth, the pro life side says it's conception.  Both both of them, I would argue, ignore the fact the change from nothing to person is gradual, not instantaneous.  It happens slowly, over 9 months.  The difference between a fetus 1 minute before birth, and a baby one minute after birth is very minimal.  Likewise, the difference between a sperm an egg on second before the sperm enters the egg and one second after is minimal.  Instead of looking for a magical "0% to 100% okay to kill" switch point, people should instead be asking "how bad is it to kill it at this point?"  A gradually increasing scale of deterence would be more accurate, in my mind, than a suddenly changing yes/no switch.

The reason why discussing personhood isn't a red herring is because we afford certain rights to persons, including right to not be killed.
You make a good point in stating that personhood isn't necessarily precisely coincident with permission to kill (as it can be okay to kill people and not okay to kill non-people), but because we have established standards and a set dialogue for when it's okay to kill people, the discussion is a meaningful one.

By the way, I believe you're severely overgeneralizing with your "point of birth" vs. "point of conception" analysis.  First because it's inaccurate; there are several other points in use including cell differentiation on the one end and viability on the other.  Second because wanting to draw a bright line doesn't imply any denial that a continuum exists, but simply the understanding that there does need to be a point where we protect rights; the question is where that point should be.

That's the trouble, though.  We affored "persons" rights, without agreeing on what "person" means.  We might both think all "people" have the right to X, but don't actually agree on whether a fetus has a right to X.  Just convincing someone to accept your definition of "person" won't require them to stick the idea that all people deserve certain rights.  Both sides of the debate fall into this trap of trying to use words where we have some agreement about their implication in cases where we don't agree on the implications.  At the end of the day, pro-choice supporters don't think fetuses deserve the same rights as a baby.  Whether that's because they don't think the fetus is a "person" or because they don't think all people should have exactly the same rights is an entirely semantic issue.  It's about definitions and terms, not about the actual rightness or wrongness of the act.  It's like Clinton saying he didn't have sex because it was only oral sex.  What we should be focusing, in my opinion, is what are the traits that people have that grant them these rights?  We don't have to decide one way or the other about what to call a fetus in order to decide whether or not it's okay to kill it.  What we do have to figure out in order to make that decision, though, are the qualities that an entity needs to have before it gets these rights and protections.


Perhaps, but I would wager that 99% of people consider the magical point to be either birth or conception.


Again, I would wager that more than 99% of people on both sides of the debate would say there is no continuum between human and not-human: it's something one either is or isn't, no in between.
Further, why does there need to be a single point where we protect rights?  Why not a continuum of rights/protections (or at least a discrete approximation to one)?  By insisting on a single point, and arguing over the point should be placed, you're forcing analog reality into a binary model.  You're treating a dial as a switch.  Sure, it's easier to write up as a law that way, but it ignores the actual facts on the ground.  It will always lead to treating two things that are more or less exactly the same as being 100% different, when those two things are just on each side of the line.

If people give up on the magical switch idea, I think the whole issue would be far less contentious.  Because there's simply no room for compromise or reaching any kind of common ground in that case.  It's an either/or situation, and it's largely not based on anything but a priori beliefs.  There's not much point in discussion, really, because you can almost never change someone's mind on that sort of thing.  With a continuum, though, there's reason for discussion, and the actual fetus' condition/traits/qualities actually has a bearing on the decision.  It becomes a question of how bad is it, rather than just is it bad, and the 'how bad' question is one where there's room for fruitful discussion.

I'd take that "99%" bet.  I've spent enough time on enough discussion forums and other environments focusing on the issue of abortion to know how diverse and complicated peoples' views are.


And, again -- there's going to be a line beyond which full rights are afforded.  That doesn't mean there can't be NEARLY full rights on the other side of that line, but that line is going to exist.  It's certainly reasonable to want to know where that line is going to be.

Well, if you can find statistics, let me know.  I may be wrong.  But from what I've seen of the people on both sides, pretty much everyone thinks there's one magical point where the fetus changes from 100% not a person to 100% a person, they just disagree if that point is conception or birth.


Okay, everyone (baring katisara when I make blanket statements like this) can agree that a baby has 'full' rights (at least in respect to not being killed).  So we can place that bar at birth without causing problems.  If you believe "nearly full rights" can be given to things before that, then putting the "full rights" bar at birth shouldn't be a problem, as doing so doesn't concede the entire argument right then and there (the way it does if we have a 0%-to-100% switch point).  The question, in my opinion, then, becomes how much rights do we give to the fetus before that point, and at which points in development do they kick in?

Noted :P

What about the liberty of the child last time I looked a human with another human have a human child, so one can assume a child in the mother is going to be a human.

So barring the mother being in danger the child should at least ,to give the most broad rights to the child as the innocent, be considered a human at conception. What line are you going to place other than that since the unborn child is at that point is a human at the genetic level just not out of the mother yet.

And I will add convenience, or even a sex crime should not be sufficient to bar the childs equal right to exist again unless its very likely the mother will die if the child is carried to any mature level. With medical science a child can be weeks premature and still be alive so my point is even more anrrow. A child must be given every chance at life and that includes if the child is likely to mature enough in the mother safely to allow the child to be removed and given even a small chance, using the best medical expertise available.

If one doesn't want a child there are plenty of ways to avoid that, and if you are raped and end up with a child its still a life its not the childs fault. Once can always give such a child up for adoption after its born.

I want to commend Ms. Libertarian for her view. I may not agree with it, but I like it in that it's consistent. It's a value of human life in all it's forms, no matter the circumstance. Not many pro-lifers I meet actually hold their belief in the face of rape. It's often an allowed exception, even if it's inconsistent with their views on the issue. Maybe your way leads to a very unpopular answer, but it's one that holds consistent integrity, at least in my view.

That said, I think there's only so far that it goes as well. For example, we often argue that the embryo has a right to life, or at least argue from that point. But why start there? I've seen no consistent reason for this, it's simply a comfortable point that's easy to talk about. Why not before? Why not before conception?

I feel that, by such standards, the sperm and the egg are equally potential humans. Why are they not granted the same rights? Because they aren't of a full genetic compliment? Sounds like a convenient excuse to me. It's often stated by pro-lifers that the stage of development of a human should be irrelevant, because each potential person will become a person, if given a fair chance and proper care. Such potential humans have the capacity for gaining a full genetic coding, if just given a fair chance and proper care. They're just at an earlier stage of development, which is often argued shouldn't matter. There's not a whole lot of difference between the egg and the embryo just after conception.

By the same token, should not these potential people have a right to life that exceeds our right to convenience? By not taking proper care of them and allowing them what they need to survive and become full people, aren't we violating their right to life? Think about all the children in the world that could had been, had we at least tried to give each egg a chance becoming a proper person? I myself have no children, but I could had easily had four by now, given that, at age 23, I've been menstruating for roughly 12 years now. Four lives that could had been, denied only by my placing my convenience over their life. And that's on the low side, if anything. Theoretically, I could have had double that.

By the perspective that all potential humans should be given a fair shot at life, a right that exceeds simple convenience, isn't the sperm and egg equally permissive for a right to life? Should we not be trying to get pregnant as much as reasonably possible, lest we deny life to another human that could had been? And, if not, does this say anything about the merits of the right to life?

Male masturbation should be illegal? I think that's what I'm hearing and, frankly, I love it.

Going to be.



What if the mother is reminded of the rapist every time she looks at that child's face? What about the psychological damage that you put on both mother and child under those circumstances? What about the financial weight of such births on society, since you're not going to force a mother to have the medical care necessary for such things, right? I mean, the tax payer should at least cover that much for the improvement of society, right?

Or are you blaming the mother for getting raped in the first place?

Yeah, but it's not the mothers fault. It's society's. Change wombs!

Pregnancy is not (generally) fun and can be seen as a punishment all its own.

That's sort of the whole dispute, though.  The pro choice side doesn't consider it to be a person yet.  Once it's is a person, yes, you can't kill it, they will say, but it's not a person now, so it can be killed.  Sort of like the way you don't (I assume) think a woman is guilty of murder for menstruating since the egg isn't yet a person.


The point most pro choice people put it at is birth.  The "human at a genetic level" test doesn't really work, because we kill things that are human at genetic level all the time without considering it murder.  Eggs, sperm, skin cells, hangnails, teeth, tumors, etc.  Saying it's illegal to kill anything that's "human at a genetic level" would open a very big can of worms that I don't think anyone would approve of.  You call it an "unborn child," which again is the whole point of disagreement, because those on the other side don't consider it to be a child yet.  You say it's "a human" (rather than just human; using the noun rather than just the adjective), which is sort of like saying it's an individual or person, which again, isn't agreed upon.

Like I've said a number of times, arguing over the issue of "is it a person or not" and looking for a magical switch isn't going to get anywhere, in my opinion.  It's all semantics, and people simply disagree over it.  The proper point for discussion, in my view, is "what traits does does an entity require before we consider it wrong to kill it?" or better still "under what situations might it be acceptable to kill an entity with quality X?"  No one on either side of the debate seems particularly keen to leave the semantic argument, though, so I can't claim to be making any more progress in the debate than anyone else!


I would second Vexen's question, then.  Why stop at an embryo?  Why not give all eggs and sperm the best medical chance possible to becoming a full human being?  If convenience is being taken off the table as being an important thing to consider, why not make it a crime for people to not have sex?  Any moment they're not having sex, potential people are being robbed of their chance at life!  And not just the potential kids their not having, but all their potential kids potential kids, and their potential kids, and so on!  Every instant a person isn't engaged in copulation is like genocide of an entire line of potential human beings!  And every one of them is completely innocent!  Now, I've taken it to a comic extreme here, but it illustrates a point:  once you start talking about what could be rather than what is, and once you start valuing potential people more than actual people, you can quickly get into ridiculous situations.  How would you counter such silly suggestions, and would the counter you offer them apply equally well to the less silly case of an embryo?

I was thinking this morning about some thought experiments/hypothetical situations that we could consider which might get us more on the same page about the actually traits or qualities an entity might have which would make it eligible for rights/protection.  What I'm looking for here, is some way to get a better handle on what it actually is about "a person" that we feel makes it something we shouldn't kill.  If we can figure out what those qualities are, then it doesn't matter if we call it "a person" or not, we can just look at it's actual qualities, and judge it based on things we agree on.  So, I'm going to give a list of 'entities,' which are a bit bizarre or impossible, but hopefully at least not too difficult to imagine.  If people state what level of rights/protections such an entity should be entitled to, in their opinion, we might be able to get a better idea about which traits are important and which are less so.

1.  A human baby, but with no head.  It's kept alive by machines that send signals to keep it's heart pumping, it's lungs breathing, etc., but it has no brain, no eyes, no face, no head.  It can't do any 'tricks' like moving around, feeling pain or pleasure, it can just lay there.

2.  A human hand, with no body attached.  Blood is pumped through it by machine to keep the cells that make it up alive, but it's just a hand with no body.

3.  A human baby with a mouse's brain replacing it's brain.  It's fully capable of independent movement, eating, etc. (ie, it's not hooked up to any machine).  It can keep itself alive, but will behave more or less like a mouse, will think it's a mouse (to whatever degree mice can think such things), etc.

4.  A mouse that is a normal mouse in pretty much every way, except that it was transplanted into a human woman when it was just a fertilized egg, and developed inside a human woman, etc.

5.  A true, sci-fi level artificial intelligence.  It can talk like a person, learn, etc., but it's all contained in 1s and 0s on a big computer.

6.  A human brain that's detached from anything that allows it to interact with the outside world.  Blood is pumped through it to keep the cells alive, but none of the nerve cells leading out of it are 'attached' to anything, so it can neither send nor receive information to/from the rest of the world.

7.  Same as 6, but that is capable of sending information only, not receiving it.

8.  Same as 6, but that is capable of receiving, but not sending.

9.  A combination of 6 and 5:  a non-artificial intelligence, or sorts.  A brain in a jar, hooked up to a computer, that can carry on all the same sort of conversation that you see in sci-fi films.

10. a mouse with a human brain switched for it's mouse brain (somehow the human brain is shrunk down to make it fit).  It has all the mental capacity of a human, but is limited to a mouse body.

11.  A human baby that secreted a toxic substance that instantly killed any human it touched other than itself.

12.  Same as 11, but a mouse that secreted the toxin.

13.  Something that was otherwise indistinguishable from a human baby, but which genetic tests consistently determined to be a cockroach.

14.  Something that was otherwise indistinguishable from a cockroach, but which genetic tests consistently determined to be a human.

15.  A fish with human eyes.

16.  A chimpanzee.

17.  A lemur.

18.  A squirrel.

19.  A tadpole.

20.  A jar of human sperm and a test tube of human eggs taped together.

21.  A fertilized chicken egg.

22.  A chicken.

23.  An intelligent alien that comes to earth, and emits a toxic gas from its skin that kills humans in a 1 mile radius.

24.  As with 23, but only makes people ill.

25.  As with 23, but only makes people unhappy.

Okay, that's plenty for now.  I'm only looking for a few words on each, really, but feel free to talk more about any which you find are particularly important examples.  Like I said, the goal is to determine which qualities are necessary or sufficient to grant what kinds of rights/protections.

1.  A human baby, but with no head.  It's kept alive by machines that send signals to keep it's heart pumping, it's lungs breathing, etc., but it has no brain, no eyes, no face, no head.  It can't do any 'tricks' like moving around, feeling pain or pleasure, it can just lay there.

No rights.  Body parts do not a person make.  If it, by its very nature, is permanently incapable of consciousness, it can't have any rights.

2.  A human hand, with no body attached.  Blood is pumped through it by machine to keep the cells that make it up alive, but it's just a hand with no body.

No rights; same as 1.

3.  A human baby with a mouse's brain replacing it's brain.  It's fully capable of independent movement, eating, etc. (ie, it's not hooked up to any machine).  It can keep itself alive, but will behave more or less like a mouse, will think it's a mouse (to whatever degree mice can think such things), etc.

If its consciousness is a mouse's consciousness, it gets the rights of an animal (essentially none).

4.  A mouse that is a normal mouse in pretty much every way, except that it was transplanted into a human woman when it was just a fertilized egg, and developed inside a human woman, etc.

A mouse is a mouse.  Animal rights (again, almost nonexistent).

5.  A true, sci-fi level artificial intelligence.  It can talk like a person, learn, etc., but it's all contained in 1s and 0s on a big computer.

Full personhood rights.  If it has all the hallmarks of awareness and consciousness, then its desires are to be respected like any other person's.  In college I actually wrote a story about a true robot wanting to join a church.  My conclusion (which is not forced on the readers; the main characters are actually atheists, and I do not disclose the church's decision on the matter) is that such a being is spiritually identical to a human and should be dealt with accordingly.

6.  A human brain that's detached from anything that allows it to interact with the outside world.  Blood is pumped through it to keep the cells alive, but none of the nerve cells leading out of it are 'attached' to anything, so it can neither send nor receive information to/from the rest of the world.

The same rights as a person in a sensory-deprevation chamber -- which is, full personhood rights.  However, if there's no way to correct this problem of complete isolation, it's not clear how it would even express its desires, making its right rather academic.

7.  Same as 6, but that is capable of sending information only, not receiving it.

Full personhood, as above.  Again, though, the isolation this mind would experience has some interesting implications.

8.  Same as 6, but that is capable of receiving, but not sending.

As 6 above.

9.  A combination of 6 and 5:  a non-artificial intelligence, or sorts.  A brain in a jar, hooked up to a computer, that can carry on all the same sort of conversation that you see in sci-fi films.

Clearly a person, and afforded all the rights of one.

10. a mouse with a human brain switched for it's mouse brain (somehow the human brain is shrunk down to make it fit).  It has all the mental capacity of a human, but is limited to a mouse body.

Again, if it has a human consciousness, thoughts, and desires -- it's human.  It doesn't matter what the body looks like.

11.  A human baby that secreted a toxic substance that instantly killed any human it touched other than itself.

A person is a person.  The fact that the baby would need to be isolated to avoid harming others would not eliminate our responsibility to respect and care for it.

12.  Same as 11, but a mouse that secreted the toxin.

Animal --> animal rights --> kill it now.

13.  Something that was otherwise indistinguishable from a human baby, but which genetic tests consistently determined to be a cockroach.

If it acts like a person, and shows evidence of the awareness of a person, it's a person.

14.  Something that was otherwise indistinguishable from a cockroach, but which genetic tests consistently determined to be a human.

If it acts like a nonperson, and shows no evidence of any past, present, or potential future personhood, it's just a cockroach.  Kill it now.

15.  A fish with human eyes.
16.  A chimpanzee.
17.  A lemur.
18.  A squirrel.
19.  A tadpole.

All animals.  Animal rights (negligible).

20.  A jar of human sperm and a test tube of human eggs taped together.

Body parts, same as 1 and 2.  No rights.

21.  A fertilized chicken egg.
22.  A chicken.

Still animals.  Still nothing.

23.  An intelligent alien that comes to earth, and emits a toxic gas from its skin that kills humans in a 1 mile radius.

Same as 11 above.

24.  As with 23, but only makes people ill.
25.  As with 23, but only makes people unhappy.

It doesn't matter what it involuntarily or reflexively does; if it exhibits personal consciousness, it's a person.

In reply to AspiringSasenna (msg #126):

Sounds like we've got pretty similar answers, AS.  I'd differentiate a bit between different animals, and I'm less sure on the brains that can't interact, but on the rest we're pretty similar.  Seems like consciousness is really a key factor for you (which is something I'd agree with).  In light of that, would you say killing a fetus before it was capable of consciousness would be acceptable (or at least, more acceptable than killing something that is capable of consciousness)?

Also, I realize now that I left out questions to probe a rather key aspect of this: the issue of whether it's current traits, or it's potential traits.

So, I'll add this one:

a cockroach that can breed with other cockroaches and produce human babies.

Or a cockroach with gradually increasing intelligence, expected to be capable of speech in 20 years (if it survives so long).

That thing has got to go, but for population control issues. It still has all the rights of an animal itself, which probably means it can expect a life in a lab.

Oooh ooh, how about a Vampire who has to drink one live body dry a day to survive? D: (he's intelligent though, not a Nosferato; not a Frikken Twilight Twink either)

Yeah, that works well too.  My take on that would be that it'd be much worse to kill it once it can talk than 20 years before it can.  Killing something intelligent enough to carry on a conversation would require a pretty extreme justification (self defense, for example).  Killing something that might someday become such a thing would certainly require more justification than killing something that couldn't (ie, a normal cockroach), but less than would be required for the speaking cockroach.


On that one, I'd have to say the victims' right to self-defense would probably trump the vampire's rights to live.

A fetus is capable of consciousness.  It's just not conscious right now.

Curious. Would you extend that to the embryo? Or the sperm and the egg?

I would extend it to the embryo, but not the blastocyst or the gametes.
I'm currently in the camp of granting the right to life starting at the primitive streak (cell differentiation), and which point the embryo is definitively a singular individual.  Prior to the primitive streak, you're dealing with an unlimited number of potential individuals.  It's at the point of cell differentiation that the human "locks in" to a definite individual form.
So, yeah -- an actual individual with potential consciousness is good enough for me.  I'd extend protection to the cockroach for the same reason.  And the comatose patient, for that matter.

Do you see any levels of badness in killing any of those things, or is it purely a 100% okay/100% not okay thing?  Could you rank them, say, in order from "worst to kill" to "least bad to kill?"

I would grant these things personhood (right to life), and so there is no "degree of evil" associated with killing them.  They have the right to not be killed.  We, by default, have no right to kill them.
I strongly equate this century's abortion argument with the previous century's slavery argument.  I believe it's thinking in terms of ranking people that allowed the de-personification of a class of persons.  I therefore prefer not to make a similar mistake.

Harvest the parts. Treated as human only insofar as it has an estate to manage, in the form of parents or siblings.



Not good for even a freakshow.



Put cheese on the opposite end of a minefield.



How much does the "mother" complain when I try to kill it?



Treat as first contact with alien species. Rights established as relevant, with a base right to life lest we be hunted by Terminators. If it can be isolated, inspect code.



Medical experiment

Psychology experiment.

Medical experiment

Is it some random redneck or a brilliant physician that managed to place himself in the jar after a tragic accident that took his wife's life and almost took his?

Get a waiver.

It will die without human contact, and it is lethal to humans. The humane response is to kill it.

Don't concern myself with humanity. Spring-loaded trap. Maybe with spiky bits.

Tests can be misleading. Await developmental milestones and react appropriately.

Wipe my shoe on something after encounter.


Them's good eatin'!



Trainable tool-user. Kill only after usefulness.



Comic relief. Hesitate to kill.



Kill when out of pizza.



Leave it alone in complete indifference.



Combine, call up "right to life" organization and inform them that the eggs need mamas NOW!



Wait until grown, sell, kill, and eat.



Sell, kill, and eat.



Does it show any sign of retreating, perhaps due to the dead earthlings around it?



If I can put up with Fox News...



Suicidally unhappy, or gloomy? Does it bring anything with it to offset this issue?

In reply to Tycho (msg #124):

Yes but to create a potential person as in a human being, even if genetically varied such as a downs syndrome child, requires a human sperm and a human egg to join which leaves out other genetic material. A fingernail so far cannot become a human person. So to keep any errors to the minimum and give the rights to the most innocent party I would still argue life begins at conception not on religious grounds, but common sense grounds. That leaves out any guessing. The only way to overcome that right to the unborn is if the mother cannot safely carry the child long enough to give the child a chance at life even if small.

As for the rape victim as my mother I was the result of a rape and am not my fathers biological child, she managed to accept the fact I was hers in the end. And am grateful I was not a statistic. If that is a problem then the child can be adopted out or raised in an orphanage couldn't it?

I think the genocide of our future is sick. And since I'm also gay what if a child could be tested for that and suddenly aborted for no other reasons, or if the child is a girl and the parents want a boy or a child has a genetic disorder and the parents don't want to bother? All this is easier to handle if you afford proper rights to the unborn child at conception then it has a right to exist save if the mother would die and there is no other option.

It's pretty easy to handle if you afford any child that has not been removed from it's umbilical cord no rights whatsoever.

@Mrs. Libertarian

Maybe not a fingernail, but scientists can now create human embryos from skin cells.

Got it. But, I still don't understand why.

Please, feel free to correct me if I'm interpreting your words incorrectly, but thusfar, the only reason I'm reading that you've chosen this part for the start of personhood is "because, otherwise, we'd have lots and lots of potential individuals." Well, yeah. But that doesn't refute my point. That just seems to mean, with all due respect, is that the implications make you feel uncomfortable.



I'd say that it fails the common sense test, seeing as there's so many people who don't think it common sense. For future reference, just because a lot of people of a particular religious identities agree on a particular fact doesn't make it common sense. Not when the issue is this contested.

I'd say this point is absolutely arbitrary. It's a matter of convenience alone, which I find strangely ironic for the crowd that considers this so important that convenience isn't a good enough reason. The difference between a zygote or even the embryo and an egg cell isn't all that much. Let me explain my perspective. Between this point and birth, so very very much still has to be added to this zygote before it it's ready for life on it's own. Brain formation, a skeleton, skin, internal organs, an ultra complex nervous system, blood, veins, etc. And it takes from the mother the energy for 'all' of it. Every little bit. That's not a small amount of resources. It's not like, at conception, if left alone, the zygote will flourish and grow. No, no, no. That's not what giving it a proper chance means. It means siphoning resources from it's host everything it'll need to create itself. And that's completely taking out everything it needs even after birth.

By comparison, from my perspective, half a genetic code seems very very very minor. Less than a percent of the difference in the end. Thus, yes, this seems so very arbitrary. The embryo is still missing so much of everything you require the mother to provide for it, and yet you still call it a person, but the egg, for not having something that literally takes mere minutes to give it, doesn't qualify, seems like someone's trying to get off on a technicality than to actually solve this problem. Which, again, seems ironic. Apparently, the idea of a woman not wanting to give all the materials and resources, and energy to the potential human out of convenience is horrid, but to simply detail the nature of these oh so important beings is perfectly worthy of a cop out for convenience. With all due respect, I think it's the least you could do.


With all due respect, genocide isn't the proper term for this. Genocide implies that pro-choice advocates want to abort all fetuses indiscriminately. That's not what this is. In fact, I'd argue that most pro-choice people would agree that having less abortions would be a good thing. I don't think it's a fair comparison.

But, if you're going to try to butcher our position, the proper term would be infanticide, not genocide. That is, the ritualistic killing of infants and babies. I think that would be a more proper qualifier for this.
This message was last edited by the player at 06:04, Tue 21 Apr 2009.

With the right procedures done in a lab, I think it a fingernail and an egg could.  But let's just keep it simple: sperm in a jar, egg in a jar. Tape the jars together, and write "baby" on the side with a sharpy.  Now "all" that needs to happen for this baby to develop into a human being, is to mix the jars together, and put the result into a woman's woman, and let it grow for nine months, and then have the woman go thrown labor, and then you've got a person.  You seem to be saying that mixing those two jars together is an 'outside step,' so that the two jars aren't actually a person.  But you don't seem to view the part about putting into a woman's womb, letting it grow for 9 months, giving birth, etc., to be an 'outside step.'  Why is that mixing together critical, but all that other stuff not?


But surely it would keep errors to even less of a minimum, and give the rights to the most innocent party of sperm and egg cells were considered persons too?  What if you're wrong?  What if life begins before conception?  Think of all the innocent sperms and eggs that will die?  Isn't it just common sense to error on that side of caution? (I know it's clear that I'm not actually taking on that view point, but actually think about the answers to these questions seriously.  Why do you feel that it's okay to kill an innocent sperm and egg right before they bump into each other, but not afterwards?)


And that's great for you and your mother.  No one is advocating manditory abortions in the case.  You're glad you're "not a statistic" (though, of course, you still are a statistic, just a different one, as are we all), and most people are glad that they're "not a statistic too."  But there are zillions and zillions of "statistics" not coming into being every second.  Each moment billions and billions of potential people are not being conceived.  Those of us who do get born are already extremely unlikely.  The whole "I wouldn't have been born if my parents had an abortion!" argument tends to make people uncomfortable, but if you think about, you wouldn't have been born if your biological father hadn't raped your mother either.  Should it be illegal to not rape women, since that would have resulted in the same thing in your case, as your mother having an abortion would have?  Surely not.  So clearly the "I wouldn't have been here if..." argument doesn't hold water.  You're glad your mother didn't choose to abort you, and that's fine.  All the other kids that your mother might have had, but didn't by not spending every moment of her adult life pregnant, would probably have been glad to have not been aborted too.  But I imagine you don't fault your mother for letting all your potential siblings not exists, right?


It would also be eaiser to handle if you afforded rights to eggs, and required that every woman have as many children as she is physically capable of having.  What if a woman had a genetic disorder that she was likely to pass on to her kids, and so decided not to have kids?  Think of all the unborn people she would be denying life to.  What if someone just decided they didn't want kids at all?  Isn't that genocide of our future too?

Lets see last time I studied biology a sperm OR egg alone are half a person and can't grow on their own into a person. If one has to make a judgement call go for the simple one that is a fertilized egg at conception is a person. Sperm inside a man do eventually get vacated if not used I believe the same for a womans eggs. If nature can dispose of them I would state the egg or sperm alone are unimportant. But put them together is the mother and life ,human life, is created at the moment of conception. Unless one can show a human man and a humna woman having puppies.

Science is moving very fast in the area of Biology right now, so maybe you might not have heard of these last you studied it.  Actually, unless you took it a while ago, I think they did mention Asexual Reproduction.  At least, when I took it they were teaching that.


Embryonic Stem Cells from Eggs Alone:

http://www.nature.com/nature/j...50/full/448116a.html

Embryonic Stem Cells from Sperm Alone:

http://men.webmd.com/news/2008...lls-from-adult-sperm

And, once again, I'm trying to show you that this is a false comparison, Ms. Libertarian.

By your implications, you're basically implying that if we let the embryo alone, totally alone, that it could survive. That's not the case. In fact, that's essentially an abortion right there. You don't need to inject poison or slash a throat. All you need is to separate it from the womb.

Why is that? Because a fetus on it's own can't survive and can't grow into a person. It requires the mother to give it everything it needs. It requires lots and lots of input. Months and months of energy and resources and maintaining a perfectly sound environment. You state that the egg isn't a person because it can't develop on it's own. I suggest to you that, by those standards, the embryo is no person either.

And, by the way, it's not unusual zygotes (that is, a fertilized egg) get disposed of regularly by the body. Just because conception occurs doesn't mean that the body necessarily picks it up. In many women, for one reason or another, it just doesn't take at that particular time.

By the way, what exactly makes an egg half a person, but the zygote a full one? The genetic code? That's easy to give it, literally minutes, and everything the zygote still lacks prior to birth takes many many months. I think the idea that minutes separate a person from a non-person, when it's months before either can survive outside it's host is kinda ridiculous. Besides, wasn't it you that stated that the state of development for a potential person should be irrelevant? Why can't providing it a sperm be considered part of "giving it a proper chance" if giving it months and months of syphoned energy is?
This message was last edited by the player at 16:27, Tue 21 Apr 2009.

And if I say, "lets see, last time I studied biology, a fertilized egg is some fraction of a person, and can't grow into a person on it's own," how would you respond?  What if someone responded the same what to your statement above?


And if I say "If one has to make a judgment call, go for the simple one that is a baby post birth is a person," or "If one has to make a judgment call, go for the simple one that is a sperm or egg is a person," how would you respond?  What do you feel is special about your particular choice of the start of personhood that makes it correct, and any others wrong?


And if a fertilized egg sometimes gets vacated, would you say the same about it?


Yes, yes, we all agree that the fetus is human (ie, can be described by the adjective "human,"), just as we all agree that anyone's fingernail is human, or a sperm is human or an egg is human.  The question everyone disagrees on is about whether it's a human (ie, the noun), or more to the point, whether it's a person.  But as I've said before, the answer to that question isn't really the issue, because the answer is different for different people.  What it means to "be a person" isn't something we all objectively can agree on, so isn't what we should be using to sort this debate out.  We should be looking for objective qualities which we can all agree on, and trying to come to some consensus on how important those qualities are.

Anyone have any comments on the shooting of Dr. Tiller at church this past Sunday?
http://www.kansascity.com/news...s/story/1225769.html
I've been looking over some of the blogs, and the comments on them (see links to some here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...r-of-dr-tiller-work/ ), and it seems like most of the bloggers are (rightfully) condemning the act, as are the majority of their readers.  A few responders, though, seem to view the murder as justified.  It's hard to say just how many people hold such views, since responders to blogs probably aren't representative of the population as a whole, but I do find it troubling that there are this many people who seem to support this act.  While most people on the right seem to be worried about "just one idiot" getting the whole anti-abortion movement painted as murders, the number of people who are defending the act, while small, makes me wonder just what fraction of anti-abortion people feel that way?  1%?  That'd still be a large number of people, even though it's a small proportion.  A tenth of a percent?  A hundredth?  What do people here think?  How large would people guess the number of people willing to kill over abortion is?  How about the number of people who wouldn't kill someone themselves, but who would support/defend such an action?

Let us assume for the sake of argument that abortion is in fact killing a non-consenting person.

At this point, I think it's pretty clear that abortion will not be made illegal for at least the next four years, and likely not in the foreseeable future. Legal options have been explored and failed. If you think abortion is genocide to the magnitude of WWII, you have no choice but to pursue more extreme actions.

From that point of view, I think he is completely justified in his actions. Condemning him would be like condemning Moses for killing an Egyptian slaver, or a civilian for attacking unsuspecting Nazi agents.

So no, unfortunately, I think the man is completely justified. He acted in what he, in an educated view, saw as ethically necessary. Now he has to understand that there's a second half to that, and has to be ready for himself, and those around him, to suffer the consequences.

Just to be clear, katisara, are you making a devil's-advocate argument here, or are these the views you actually espouse?  I'm fine with debating this purely for the sake of debate, but if that's what it is, I think it'd be good to make that very clear from the get go, just in case anyone might be reading this that might take the "it's okay to shoot people you disagree with" argument to heart.  Also, since I'm trying to get a better handle on just how big the fraction of people who think it's actually okay to shoot abortion doctors is, knowing whether you're one of them, or just arguing the case for them since they're not here to do it themselves will be useful.

I don't think it matters whether or not he actually believes it; if he's willing to state the opinion, and willing to argue it, that's all that really matters for an argument.  Once you start treating the arguer as a firm believer in the argument they're making, you leave yourself vulnerable to committing ad-hominem rhetoric.  Which, no offense, you sometimes slip into when the argument seems rather incredulous.

If the argument can successfully be made superior in relation to all other arguments, then it by default becomes a tool of justification for those wishing to kill doctors, whether or not Katisara actually supports the argument or not, and whether or not he makes it known one way or the other.

I don't think that all abortions are equivalent to murder, therefore the logic that follows doesn't work for me personally. However, I do think it is ethical to kill someone in order to save a third party's life, so the rest of the premise I think holds true. There are times when it is justified to take a life, even when you personally are not threatened.

If I honestly thought that every abortion was equivalent to murder, without seeing another course available to put an end to them (which I don't), 'terrorist' attacks would be the only moral course left available to me.

The thing I'm more worried about, though, is that even if it isn't made superior in a logical/rational sense, it can be made "superior" in an emotional or otherwise sense.  If there's someone who's reading this who might be swayed by the "it's okay to kill doctors" argument (which I realize may be very unlikely), it'd rest easier on my conscious if katisara made it clear from the get go that he actually thinks such arguments are flawed.  I know it's very unlikely to be the case, but I'd feel more than a little bit guilty if a debate we approached as just an exorcise in rhetoric lead someone to think it was okay to murder people who disagreed with them.  So, just on the off chance that there's someone who might think "hmm...katisara thinks it's okay to kill doctors who perform abortions, and katisara seems like a pretty level-headed guy...better go get my gun" (and again, I realize that this is a long-shot), I think it's a good idea to clarify that katisara doesn't actually believe it's okay to kill doctors who perform abortions (if he doesn't actually believe that it's okay).  If a person reads the debate and thinks "hmm...even though katisara doesn't believe it himself, he makes such a good argument that I'm convinced it's okay to kill doctors," I'll think that's a tragedy, I'll feel we've at least done our part to avoid that if we make it clear that it's purely a rhetorical exorcise up front.

Normally, I agree that whether the arguer believes the case their making doesn't really matter to the debate.  But on things like whether its okay to go out and murder someone, I think a bit more caution is warranted.

You're worried someone is actually going to listen to, and follow me? I don't even do that!

No, please don't kill abortion doctors. Regardless as to your feelings on abortion, murdering other people is definitely wrong, and God said unequivocally not to do it.

With all due respect, Katisara, how is what you're describing any different than a radical Muslim who kills infidels because he thinks this is what Allah wants him to do? If simply believing that the world would be better without a particular group or person was justification enough, we could use the same argument to justify the actions of John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Osama Bin Laden. Likewise, with many pro-life organizations and blogs calling him the most pro-abortion President ever, it would seem like justifying people to assassinate Obama.

This is domestic terrorism, and nothing less than that. He knew what would happen if he shot the man, he knew that he wouldn't get away with it. But it would send a message, just like the radical Muslim does with his. Perform abortions, and you could be killed. Or, heck, even just be pro-choice and you deserve to die.

A big shame here, however, is that many pro-lifers seem to paint this as something almost heroic. Far too many commentators seem to spend a moment denouncing it, followed by a lengthy explanation on why it was justified from a perspective, and imply, if not outright say, that this man had it comming. A man gets killed in front of his family in his church, and these people want to vilify the victim. How pro-life is that?
This message was last edited by the player at 17:05, Tue 02 June 2009.

Broadly speaking, it isn't - if you honestly, morally believe that something is a terrible affront against morality or God, and that people are actively doing it and will continue doing it, and the only way to defend the defenseless is through combat, then you must either choose combat, or admit that your morality isn't really all that important to you (or put it on a third party to do).

Specifically speaking, killing infidels in this context is contrary to the Koran, and therefore the people who are currently doing things like 9/11 aren't being true to their God or their religion, and their specific motivations need to be addressed appropriately.




It's a cost/benefits analysis. Was Lincoln going to kill thousands of people? What about JFK? Most moral structures agree that moral is one of the most grievous sins you can commit. Killing someone because he jaywalks regularly does not make sense - the sinfulness of jaywalking is minor compared to the sinfulness of murder. However, killing an active killer the night before he moves to kill his next victim(s) I think could be easily justified, by most any moral system you care to name (with a few exceptions). We agree on this point as a culture, both when we put killers to death, or when we commit people to death in war. The US was not acting in self-defense when it entered WWI, and debatably, in WWII, yet we entered both and most people agree those were good things. In fact, many people think the US should have entered WWII earlier. Why? Because innocent lives were being lost, and sometimes it's okay to kill, an moral evil, in order to save lives, a moral good.



Not really. It would be ineffective. Obama doesn't draft laws. This is likely one of the most pro-abortion congresses ever, however, and they are the ones who create new laws. Or, one could argue, it lies on the Supreme Court. But really, Obama has nothing to do with it. You may as well complain about the most pro-abortion hotel owner, for all the good it would do you at this junction.



Yep. But one man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter. It just depends on which side of the coin you're on. I will give credit, however, that it isn't conventional terrorism like 9/11 because it was aimed only at guilty parties - the person who is actually killing. It's the difference between shooting a known mafia hitman, and shooting the hitman's mother. Is it really unethical to shoot a known and active murderer?



I think people willing to die for what they perceive as upmost moral good show some strong, positive qualities, even if I disagree with their particular understanding of morality.



That indeed is true. It is a problem with this particular philosophy supporting that sort of behavior. However, if you're a utilitarian (the ends justify the means), it makes complete sense. I'm pro-money, but that doesn't mean I'm not willing to spend money to make money.

Kat does present an interesting scenario, one that is not difficult to justify, and difficult to condemn.

Imagine you're at a Nazi death camp, and you have the chance to take out a nazi executioner that has been killing children all day. 4 year olds, 6 year olds, 10 year olds, and so on. What person would condemn the sniper that killed the executioner?

I think clearly we would condemn any man who killed even just one 2 month old baby. But we have several here who are clearly find it acceptable, and I gather would support the right of child murderer as long as the children are 8 inches on the other side of the womb.

Abortion is a complex philosophical issue, Truth. It doesn't really do anyone any good to make gross oversimplifications of the opposing viewpoint.
This message was last edited by the player at 03:01, Wed 03 June 2009.

I believe Truth was speaking of one's legal right, not necessarily of it being morally right. As in, as a country, we say using deadly force to protect a born child is legally justifiable, but using deadly force to protect a child at the equal age since conception, but who has not yet been born is not legally justifiable. This is, as Tycho has pointed out, a result of the law being written on sharp, discrete lines, and ignoring that the change is more of a long smear. In that regard, Truth is completely precise in what he is saying - that 8 inches makes all the difference between 'defense of a child' and 'homicide', from a legal standpoint.

But this is the kind of 'moral relativism' that people who reject moral relativism complain about.  It's not just saying "there is no absolute wrong/right," it's saying "absolutely everything is okay."  Basically, it's a "if you believe it strong enough, then its okay to kill anyone."  While putting ourselves in the killer's shoes and trying to understand why he did what he did is a good thing, because it helps us prevent such things happening again, I think it's important that we don't just accept the killer's assumptions as given when we decide whether we consider it wrong or right.  Sure, we can say it was right from his perspective, but pretty much every murder is right from the murder's perspective.  What we're asking, though (or what I find the much more important question, at least), is whether it was right from our perspective.  And I hope we can all agree that no, it wasn't.


But you're applying a different standard to these terrorists than you are to the guy who killed the doctor.  For the doctor-killer, you started with "let's assume..." and took his position as granted, but for the muslim terrorists you're pointing out why the assumptions they used to justify their acts are wrong.  We should be doing the same for the person who killed the doctor: pointing out why he is wrong to believe that killing the doctor was the right thing to do, not starting with his assumption that it was.

If we accept this killing as justified, we'd also have to accept an animal-rights activist killing farmers, or even just people who eat meat.  If we accept this killing as justified, we'd also have to accept an anti-war activist assassinating politicians.  Essentially, we'd have to accept any and all murders as justified.



There's a difference between being willing to die for something, and being willing to kill for it, though.  This isn't some selfless person making a sacrifice, this is someone who walked into a church and shot a man dead, threatened to shoot people who stopped him from driving away, then drove off down the road.  Like I say, it's fine to try to put ourselves in their shoes and try to see things from their point of view, but we need to be careful to remember to make clear that we reject what they did, even as we try to understand it.

In terms of pure utilitarianism, I think its important to point out that this person probably won't have advanced their goals in the long run.  By making the pro-life movement look like a pro-murder movement, he's likely made it less likely that abortion laws will be changed in his way any time soon.  He's made it less likely that his opponents will listen to his side, or be willing to compromise.  His set a precedent that the proper way to deal with people you disagree with is to shot them, which might influence people with any number of ideas to do the same.  He shot a man in a church, which will lead people to believe the pro-life movement's religious beliefs are hypocritical.  Basically, he's made it more likely that people will view the pro-life movement as violent crack-pots with no respect for the law or human life.  He has made a lasting change on abortion laws less-likely, which does more harm (in his own view) in the long run than he's prevented.

Phrasing it like this can be used to justify anything, though, as long as there's a 0%/100% switch in the legal system.  "We'd all condemn anyone who ate a 2 year old baby, but we have several here who clearly find it okay to do so if the child happens to have a few different chemicals in their DNA."  You're intentionally trying to obscure the real reasons people have different views of a fetus and a baby, by describing it as "just 8 inches."

More importantly, though, you're falling into the same trap that katisara did:  starting with the assumption that the killer's views are correct.  Sure, the killer was right to kill...in the killer's opinion,, but I'm not particularly interested in the killer's view (since I already know what it is).  I'm more interested to see what fraction of pro-life supporters are willing to say "this was wrong.  He should not have killed that doctor, and I reject him as part of my movement for taking that action."  Some seem to do that, others seem to say "yeah, he probably shouldn't killed him...but let me tell you about all the things wrong about that guy who got shot in his church..."  and still others seem to say "yeah, right on!  He's a hero!"

A lot of the comments on the blogs I read from pro-life people had things like "just wait, the left is going to paint us all as crazies now, and act like we're all in favor of killing," which is a valid concern, I think.  However, I was surprised by the number of people who defended the action, or were in support of it, which totally undermined the first point of view, since it seemed to indicate that a non-trivial number of pro-lifers are actually in favor of killing abortion doctors.  I would think/hope that the ones most vehemently rejecting this act would be pro-lifers who didn't want their movement to be seen as pro-murder, but that doesn't seem to be the case for many pro-lifers.

I'm sure that's what they argued about black slavery, or why it was ok to round up the jews in Nazi concentration camps. They were complex philosophical issues. Instead of calling them human beings with equal rights, they called them blacks, or jews or fetuses, and that made it ok to treat them less than human.

I'm sure that's what you'll say about sperm cells too, TitL.  Instead of calling them human beings with equal rights, you call them sperm cells, so it's okay to treat them as less than human.

See how that really doesn't sound convincing?  See how applying one argument to something entirely different doesn't really work?  Will you believe that sperm cells deserve equal rights to a child just because someone says not doing so is comparable to being a nazi or a slave owner?  All you're really doing here is intentionally ignoring the differences that the other side considers important, and implying that they're doing something very different from what they actually are.

Whatever one's views on abortion, it's important (at least if you want any solution that doesn't require killing off the other side) to try to pin down the differences in values and assumptions that lead to the difference in favored policy, and then try to address those differences.  You might be surprised at how rarely calling someone a nazi gets them to change their mind. ;)

As I've said many times here, the reason the two sides can't see eye to eye on abortion, in my view, is that they're both looking for a switch when reality is giving them a knob.  Both sides want to impose some artificial point at which a fetus magically changes from 0 worth to 100% human being, but that's not what actually happens in nature.  The pro-life side saying "it's a human being!" is misleading, because it intentionally distorts the fact that there are very real differences between a fetus and what we normally think of as being a "human being."  Likewise, the pro-choice side gets it wrong when it tries to assign absolutely no worth or rights to the fetus until the exact moment of birth.

The question isn't "when does it become a human being," because clearly 'human being' means different things to different people (if it didn't, there'd be agreement over whether the fetus is a human being or not), but rather "how bad is it to kill this thing at this particular moment, and how does that level of badness compare with that of making a woman give birth to a child against her will?"  That's a question that people can have a meaningful discussion over, even if they disagree.  The "is it a human" question can generate little more than "IS NOT!" "IS TOO!" shouting matches.

If one really wants to reduce the number of abortions that are going to happen, the answer isn't shooting abortion doctors.  Rather, the answer is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.  This is (or should be) something that both sides of the abortion debate should agree on.  Unfortunately, both sides seem more interested in shouting at each other over their disagreements than working together on the things they do agree on.

Thinking about this a bit more, the defenses of the murder of the doctor in this thread may provide some use, though, because they're all framed as a "sure it's bad, but sometimes you have to do something bad to prevent something worse" argument.  That's actually a step in the right direction, because the question of what's worse is exactly the kind of thinking that's too often missing in this debate (which focuses far too much just on whats bad or wrong.

In their arguments here, TitL and katisara have just demonstrated that they're capable of looking at two bad/wrong actions, and deciding which is the lesser evil.  That's just what we need to do to get a better understanding of when abortion should be allowed, and when it shouldn't.  They should now be able to answer questions like "which is it worse to kill, a one month fetus, or an 8.5 month fetus?" or "which is worse, forcing a woman to give birth, against her will, to her rapist's child, or letting her decide to abort it?"  Even if we can't agree on the answers to those, simply accepting them as the actual questions of importance would be a big step in the right direction.

Not at all. Your belief that something is wrong does not make it so. However, if you truly believe something is wrong, you must either act upon it appropriately, or admit you really don't feel so strongly about it. If you think something is akin to murder, that means you really need to take extreme measures. I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who say abortion is murder, but then can't be bothered to actually do anything about it (unless they also think murder is generally okay, or if they're currently busy addressing some other issue akin to murder). Taking your child to a soccer game is simply not as important as stopping TENS OF THOUSANDS OF MURDERS GOING ON EVERY YEAR (as you might phrase it, were you pro-life).

The killer's actions are completely justifiable - assuming you accept that abortion is equivalent to murder. I respect his strength and internal integrity, even if I think what he did was morally wrong in and of itself. I think he should be tried and, if guilty, sent to prison, where he can never do it again. But I won't say that he didn't stand up for his beliefs.



I'm pointing out that in the case of the killer, he did it on moral grounds. In the case of Al Qaeda, they're doing it on political grounds. The two are apples and audis. I don't think killing solely on political grounds is ever really justifiable.



Indeed. I have to give credit to groups like ALF. They stick to their ethics, even at great personal expense. Their ethics are not of 'convenience', and can't be put away on Monday morning.



That's not at all true. Beyond the fact that I've never said that even a murder on moral grounds is objectively justified (only subjectively so), this completely ignores murder on political, economic, entertainment, etc. grounds. There are many people who kill because they know, while it's morally wrong, they stand to gain personally and think that more valuable.



Indeed. It's easy to die for something. It's difficult to live for it.

Ghandi did something that people thought was 'wrong', and very nearly spent his life in prison for it. He also got a good deal of people killed in the process. Again, WWII is a great example of an ethical war. Does anyone here feel that American and British soldiers voluntarily entering a conflict not in self-defense, and killing German soldiers and civilians, or civilians in Germany attacking other civilians responsible for terrible crimes were bad people?

Now I will give you, his threatening other people and driving away, that both I can't see as being morally justified. Threatening innocent people isn't saving anyone, and the man has to be ready for the consequences of his actions.



Debatable. If another person took it up as well, the cost of being an abortion doctor would suddenly increase. People would choose not to be abortionists because there's an elevated risk someone is going to shoot you. Fewer abortionists generally means increased cost or difficulty with getting an abortion, which means fewer abortions. One lone voice in the wilderness wouldn't do much, however, except make a political point.



His opponents already aren't listening, and aren't willing to compromise. Why should they? They've won. There is a 0 chance of abortion laws changing in the next 8 years, and a near-zero chance of them changing in our lifetimes. The political process has failed. Do you seriously think the pro-life movement has any chance of turning over the current laws any time in the foreseeable future?

In that regard, really, I don't think anything has been lost. To the contrary, acts like this bring attention back to issues which are largely being ignored. It was bombing of airlines which brought attention to land contentions in the Middle East - and now many Americans think the Palestinians are right, even though it was the Palestinians who were killing random civilians. The simple truth is, this sort of thing is effective. It brings attention to your cause, and if your cause is genuinely one where you've been wrong, it may very well result in people sympathising with your side.



Do you think that violence is not effective at changing behavior? If anyone didn't know this before, they just haven't been paying attention.



Again, honestly, you think there's any real chance of change in the laws? Because I sure don't. Seeing a political group as willing to use violence does actually give them credibility. Do you try to compromise with a man with a gun? Or do you just give him what he wants? It's sad, but true. Armed people aren't easily ignored.

Fine, but then any killing is completely justifiable, so long as you accept that <whatever the given motive> is equivalent to murder.  If I believe wearing blue jeans is equivalent to murder, then killing someone for wearing blue jeans is justifiable.  But that part about "if you assume..." is the whole problem.


I don't think anyone is asking anyone to say this person didn't stand up for his beliefs, though, but rather to say that his beliefs are wrong.


What if they believe converting people christianity is equivalent to (or worse than) murder?  (note, to be consistent, you can't point out that it's not actually equivalent in this case, but just accept it as given in the other.)  I would wager that Al Qaeda consider their cause to be a moral one as much as a political one.  It doesn't change the fact that flying a plane into a building is wrong, though.


Some of the acts that were committed by the allies during WWII were certainly wrong, I would say.  That doesn't mean the whole war was unjustified.  We need to be able to say, at some point, "okay, these actions are acceptable, and these aren't."  If we can't say "going into a church and shooting a defenseless person is not acceptable," then I fear we're simply in a "do what you feel is right, and kill anyone who stands in your way" scenario, which is not at all the way I would like the world to be run.


Except that making the supply more costly doesn't necessarily decrease demand, it simply makes the product cost more.  We see this with drugs, and we see it with abortion too.  Making abortion illegal doesn't make abortion go away, it just makes it more risky and secret.  Shooting doctors won't make abortion go away, it'll just make it get done more discretely, and at higher risk to all involved.


I'd disagree on that, but more importantly think it misses the point significantly.  The goal isn't (or at least shouldn't be) to change the abortion laws, but rather to reduce the number of abortions.  There is significant room for compromise on that, because both sides want it.  However, if the pro-life side alienates the pro-choice side, the pro-choice side isn't going to seek the pro-life's side's input when it's trying to come up with ways of reducing the number of abortions.


I think it's unfair to describe one side getting its way as "the political process has failed."  Especially if you go from there to "the only left to do is to start shooting people."  Does the pro-life movement have a chance at over-turning Roe-v-Wade in the foreseeable future?  Probably not (I'm putting 'foreseeable' at about 8 years?).  Does it have any chance at changing the current laws without over turning RvW?  Yes, I think so.  But only if it seeks some sort of compromise, rather than seeking only to defeat the other side.  I assume everyone saw the poll that came out a few weeks ago that showed, for the first time since Roe-v-Wade, that a majority of americans thought abortions should be less available than they are now.  There are plenty of people who are in favor of limiting the scenarios in which an abortion is legal, without wanting to make every abortion illegal.  That's progress that the pro-life side can make, but they'll only make it if they view it as a good thing in-and-of itself, rather than just stepping stone on the way to eliminating the other side completely.


I don't think anyone's sympathy for the palestinians is due to their killing random civilians, but rather due to Israel's reaction to those killings.  If the pro-choice side started rounding up pro-lifers and shooting them as a response to this killing, then I could see your point.  But I really don't think there's going to be too many people who think "Oh, I hadn't realize the pro-life side was the one with murders!  I'm going to switch my support!"


It can be, though often not in the intended way.  And, effective or not, it's rarely the moral/ethical way to promote change.  I don't want the US to devolve into a place where every disagreement is settled at gun point.


Yes, but that's because I see room for change without a complete and total victory for the pro-life side.


Again, I don't want the US to be a place where if you don't get your way, you start shooting people.  I don't want people to think that murder is a good way to get credibility.  I don't want to reward people who think it's okay to murder by their group gaining credibility.  I want everyone, on both sides of the debate, to turn their back on that.  I want the pro-life side to say to those willing to kill doctors "No!  You are not one of us if you're willing to do this.  We don't want you in our group, and we don't condone what you do."  And I would want the pro-choice side to do the same of anyone who used murder or violence to promote silence the other side.

Again, that's not true. Most murders are not on moral grounds, therefore the moral justification argument does not work.

Secondly, then we have to sit down and decide what is reasonable for forming a moral opinion. "Because it's funny" is not sufficient grounds for a moral statement. "Because I might possible be insane" is also not sufficient grounds.



Which aspect? That abortion is equivalent to murder? I don't agree with it, but my stance isn't so hard that I could say it's wrong with any degree of confidence. That it's sometimes justifiable to kill someone if it saves innocent lives? I don't think I could argue with that one either.



9/11 was not an attempt to stop Christian conversions either.

However, the argument that losing a life is better than losing a soul, and therefore it's ethical to kill missionaries and people on the verge of conversion. That's sort of how it's been done for a few thousand years, and is still done in many countries. I don't agree with it. I don't know if an objective proof could be formulated, either.



Indeed, we do. But who is 'we'?



Increasing cost does decrease demand. It's a definition of economics. If it costs more to abort a baby than give a baby up for adoption, more babies will be given up for adoption. It isn't coincidence that, while abortion numbers have risen since Roe v Wade, adoption numbers have plummeted.



Again, I've not seen any evidence anywhere of the pro-choice side coming to the pro-life side in any form of a compromise. You are more than welcome to prove me wrong.



I actually didn't.



Again, from where I'm sitting, I really don't see a lot of chance of that happening. It's become a political hot button. The courts have passed their judgment and we're unlikely to see anything else about that in the near future. Congress has shown no interest in the matter whatsoever. I'm not even aware of a significant push in the past four or six years. I've not seen anything from any pro-choice group showing they're seriously interested in addressing the issue. Abortion has basically become a non-issue for most people when not in voting season. It's lost its media attention. No media attention means nothing's goign to happen on it.



Indeed, but they never would have noticed the Palestinians in the first place if something hadn't made it a global problem. You probably have a very strong view on the Israel/Palestine issue. You likely do not have a strong view on the Spain/Whatever that Ethnic Group in North Spain is called issue. The big difference? Palestinians resorted to terrorism to force media attention on their issue. The other group didn't. Palestinians don't have any greater claim on their land than the other group does.

The truth is, terrorism is effective at getting global support behind a perceived injustice. Look at Chechnya, the IRA, Nigeria or what-have-you. And oftentimes, that attention is enough to come to a resolution.



You're right about the law of unintended consequences. That is a real concern, although like I said, it seems like many of the negative consequences have already been nullified.

As for it being moral/ethical... again, I think most of us agree that killing to save a thousand children is probably ethical by most moral codes. It's not like he's killing because they ran out of apple juice at the drive-thru. He is fighting what he perceives to be a modern American genocide (and has evidence to support his claim).



I do, however, want the US to be a place where a man or woman will put himself at great personal risk, using deadly force if necessary, to save an innocent life. I think an American (or whichever nationality you'd like) shooting someone in the process of kidnapping a child shows signs of having a healthy moral compass. Abortion really is one of the few modern moral issues where I could see murder being justified.

Again, that's not true. Most murders are not on moral grounds, therefore the moral justification argument does not work.

Really? I would think that most people committing murders (aside from psychopaths) try to justify it morally, even if it's as basic as: 'he had it coming.'

I don't think "he had it coming" is a moral argument. You may try to justify something, but that isn't the same as trying to say it is morally right, or was done on moral grounds.

But trying to justify your action is a moral argument. You are trying to say that you did was right, not wrong.

Not necessarily. Saying "now I have money, and before I didn't, and I really like money" isn't much of a moral argument. It's an argument of utility. I haven't heard of any cases of someone saying "it is ethically okay to murder, as long as I personally profit." Most muggers know what they're doing is ethically wrong. They are aware that threatening and killing people is, objectively, a bad thing. They just care more for their subjective comfort than for objective morals.

You forgot "while twirling your long, thin mustache."

This...sounds really dangerous. Katisara, are you suggesting that everyone who believes abortion is wrong should resort to terrorism to stop it? I mean, should there be more doctors who do abortions killed? Because, if it isn't, like you keep suggesting it isn't, then you're making it sound awfully close.



Again, you're applying the most favorable circumstances. Why don't you also applaud the KKK for acting heroically in their beliefs, for having the strength to not just talk about it, but do something about it, when the legal system fails for them? By the same token, you should applaud every time they lynch a minority, because they had the strength in their conviction enough to do it.



You're falling into that same trap again though. You're giving this man the most favorable of circumstances, while giving everyone else the least favorable. You automatically assume that he did it, not just because he thinks he's saving lives, but because he 'is' saving lives. Then, when talking about Al Qaeda, you automatically make the assumption that they did it for causes not worth their own lives or the killing of others, that they did it for politics instead of actually believing their cause is a holy one. You dismiss the radical Muslim argument right off the bat, but agree with his reasons right from the start as well.

It's not like you can't see this guy in the most unfavorable of circumstances either. From a legal standpoint, this is cut and dry. Abortion is legal, murdering civilians is not, fetuses until a certain point don't have legal rights. Case closed.



Again, favorable circumstances. You automatically grant that this guy was doing it because he thought it was the right thing to do. Doesn't this come into conflict with what you said earlier, about doing wrong to do right? How is this different? You can't seriously suggest that this man didn't think killing people was wrong, or else he would probably have no problem with abortion. He did wrong, however, to support an ulterior motive, and one can argue this was every bit as political as what Al Qaeda does, given that this is a very political issue.

And again, it seems like you arguing this, at least from my perspective, only lends credence to extremist Muslims, some of whom do actually believe that killing infidels in an inherently good act, unlike this man who committed wrong to do a right in even the most favorable of perspectives. Those are the people who aren't committing any sins here.



Again, for someone who says, outwardly at least, that this was indeed the wrong act, you tread on some dangerous statements that can easily be interpreted the wrong way. Are you suggesting that, because this man lived through this, that he has a more noble road than someone who died for their cause? Mind you, the retort this statement was made from what making the point that this man didn't sacrifice his life, he sacrificed someone else's. Are you saying that's admirable?


...geez, again for someone who's saying this isn't the right action, you sure do spend a lot of time making it seem like it is. Are you suggesting the  effective strategy for pro-lifers should be to kill abortion doctors from now on?



That's a good philosophy. "Let me have my way, or I'll kill you." and "Talk about my cause, or I'll kill someone." Is this the strategy the pro-life movement should move towards?



But again, doesn't it hurt the cause, especially one that's supposed to be the moral high ground, to stoop to these levels? I kind of agree, because the response. Based on people's reaction to this whole event, especially those of the strongest voices of the movement, I'd have to say the pro-life movement is looking a lot like the pro-murder movement as well. The fact that so many pro-life people justify his behavior seems to paint them as hypocrits of the highest degree. Like, "Life has intrinsic special value that cannot be ignored...except those who disagree with us" or "Murder is always wrong...unless you're killing a pro-choice person, then it's admirable."



So then, why do you oppose it? Seriously, looking at everything in this post, every favorable circumstance you grant this guy, every justification made, statements that basically infer that this is the way the pro-life movement should do things...why do you feel that it's wrong?

I'm sorry if it seems like I'm jabbing at you with these statements. If you say you don't believe this is right, I have to generally believe that. However, you send a lot of time talking about why they think it's right, and for all the arguing you do, it does come off that way. But you don't. I'm guess what I'm asking is, if this isn't a good thing that this man did, why aren't you talking about why it's wrong, instead of all the reasons that it could be right? After all, with all the excuses, you still come to the conclusion that you don't agree with him. Why?
This message was last edited by the player at 18:43, Wed 03 June 2009.

"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

What I am saying is that there are times when it is morally justified to kill. That time may be rare, but it exists. Unfortunately, as Tycho pointed out, what is worth killing over is not well defined. I could definitely see abortion as being right on that line.



They did have strength of conviction, however the threats they were concerned about were not equivalent to murder, therefore using murder to fight them was not justified. (Plus, I think it can be pretty effectively shown that most cases of racism are not morally right, or that their moral arguments for racism are fundamentally flawed. Fighting for a moral wrong is never right.)



1) I don't assume he actually did save lives, only that it has the potential to save lives (depending primarily on other, external factors).

2) I disagree about Al Qaeda acting out of religious/moral motivations because the stuff they speak out against is not religious/moral. I simply think you chose a poor example; they said they're engaging in political activism, so saying they're engaging in a religious war is sort of wrong. If you had an example of say the Mayans sacrificing humans for their god, that would be a pretty strong example. Presumably they had a strong reason for believing in their god, and that their god wanted human blood, and feeding their god was more important than protecting a human life (because they believed human sacrifice was necessary to be able to feed their people). In that case, yes, given the information available to them at the time, one could say their position was justifiable. That doesn't mean it was good, just that it seemed better than the other option (no sacrifices, everyone starves).



No question. He's going to prison, and that's what he deserves.



Okay, it's true, he could have killed the doctor knowing it's wrong, for other unstated reasons. But that's not what we're presented with. I'm operating on the assumption that:
1) The killer believes abortion is equivalent to murder (as in, they're both bad)
2) The killer recognizes the doctor as someone who is committing abortions
3) The killer does not believe there is another reasonable route available to realistically reduce the number of abortions



I don't know. What did I say?



No, I think he knew killing was wrong. However, I think that abortion is a MORAL issue with a political component. Abortion, by its nature, is about the nature of what is human, and the validity of killing - that makes it a moral question. It only became political when enough people got together thinking they could effectively enforce rules on this moral issue. I can't imagine the killer thought he was going to have a serious, positive political influence. It's not like suddenly law-makers are going to go 'oh, wow, yeah, we were wrong. Abortion is illegal now.' I could be wrong, I'm not the killer (honest!) but I just have difficulty imagine his actions being done with the intention of causing direct, POLITICAL change.




Again, I think you chose a poor example. The Koran specifically says not to kill Christians, except if they're prisoners or in warfare. If you had an example of say Mulsims killing Buddhists (which I think is Kosher) in order to encourage them to convert and save their souls, or killing homosexuals, people converting away from Islam or such, because such things are permissible, YES, I would agree, you have found an analogous situation. Yes, I think a strong argument could be made for Muslims (or really, Christians), that it is better to kill a homosexual Muslim/Christian before they actually commit that act, on the grounds that you are saving their souls. However, there's a counter-argument there - the homosexual has the right to make his own decisions and damn his own soul. That's his decision - not yours. A fetus has no such power of choice. (i.e., homosexuality is a victimless crime, abortion is not. The only 'victim' you're saving killing homosexuals is the homosexual who put himself in that position. The victim you're saving killing abortionists is unwilling fetuses.)



Yeah, I do that a lot :P



For this cause? No. But for instance, I would have more respect for someone who will suffer life imprisonment for say distributing bibles in China, than someone who is martyred for the same.



Keep in mind, there's a strong difference between 'right' and 'effective'.

That's a difficult call, here in the US. We have a strong, effective law enforcement system, with a strong society based heavily on the assumption of people not regularly killing each other. So the chance of success, and the risk of significant unintended consequences is high. (This applies regardless as to your cause). However, indeed, with whatever cause, if you can successfully and regularly kill or seriously threaten people critical for a particular operation, you can very effectivelly shut down, or at least seriously limit that operation from continuing. Is it morally right? Probably not. Is it effective? Most certainly.



No, it probably isn't the direction they should go. It's also not a 'good' philosophy. It is, however, oftentimes a very effective philosophy. "The man with the gun makes the rules."



It does come with a cost. But really, you as strongly pro-choice, does this make you any less likely to vote against banning abortions? Let me also ask, is it worse to have your name shamed, but save a thousand lives, or is it better to let those people die, but be considered a saint? (I really don't have an answer to that.)



1) I personally am not as strongly pro-life as these people. Therefore, I do not think the death of a fetus is equivalent to the death of an adult.
2) While I think these behaviors are effective, and would ultimately save more lives then they lost if properly implemented, I am not generally an 'ends justify the means' sort of person. I believe the way you do something is just as important as what it is you're doing.

This really comes down to the old hypothetical question; if you could save an entire elementary school full of children from certain death, by you yourself torturing and killing a single child, would you do it?

I've never had to face that myself. I'd like to think I wouldn't. But I can completely understand why someone would.

Well, for the moment, you and I, and those in the discussion.  Ideally, I'd like to see all pro-life people reject this act without qualification.  No "it's wrong, but..." but rather, a firm "this is not the right way, and we don't condone it in the slightest."


There are cases where increasing cost doesn't decrease demand.  More importantly, though, you're assuming that economics is driving the price of an abortion, which assumes that abortion doctors are setting the price to maximize their profit, which I would dispute.  I would wager that most people getting an abortion pay less than the maximum they'd be willing to pay, in part because doctors providing them are doing so partly out of sympathy for the mothers, rather than purely to maximize their profits.  I also don't think doctors providing abortions are in any kind of price-reducing competition with one another, which means eliminating one won't make the others raise their prices due to lack of competition.  We can look at many places around the world and see that making abortion illegal doesn't make it go away, we can see that threats of violence against those who perform or get an abortion doesn't make them go away.


Obama has said he wants to work with the pro-life side to find ways to reduce the number of abortions.  Hillary Clinton has said the same thing.  Each time, though, the pro-life side seems to say "that's not good enough.  We don't want anything to do with that."  The pro-life side seems to view anything less than a complete and total ban on all abortions as unacceptable, rather than a step in the right direction.





http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6426576.html
Sorry, I got it a bit wrong.  It's that for the first time more than half of the people polled consider themselves "pro-life."  Also, more people believe abortion should never be legal, than those who believe it should always be legal, which is a switch.  Though, a majority (53%), still think it should be legal only in certain situations.


Again, though, you seem to be focused entirely on changing the laws about abortion, which may be unlikely to change, and ignoring the possibility of reducing the number of abortions while leaving it legal to get one.  Comprehensive sex-education, readily available birth control, these kinds of things can reduce the number of abortions.  All too often, though, the pro-life side rejects these things.  There is progress to be made on this if both sides stop focusing on trying to eliminate the other and instead try to work on those things they agree about (such as less abortions would be a good thing).


I disagree entirely.  The Basque seperatists have and do use terrorism to advance their cause (recall that they were originally blamed for the train bombing before the spanish elections a few years back).  The reason they don't get the sympathy and support that the palestinians do is that Spain is oppressing them the way that Israel oppresses palestine.  Spain doesn't bulldoze houses, or blockade the region so that no goods get in.  The ETA has killed over 800 people, and is listed as a terrorist organization in the US and europe.  The basque independence movement is largely one of politics and independence rather than oppression like palestine.


And that kind of thinking is going to set back the movement.  It makes me, and other people who don't hold rigid "abortion is always okay" views, less eager to listen to the pro-life argument.  It makes me more afraid of the pro-life movement than sympathetic to them.  It makes me think they're a threat to society, rather than a group with a legitimate concern to be addressed. It makes me think things like "even if they were right about abortion, I don't want people around me that are going to shoot me if they disagree with me on some hot-button political issue."  If they want laws changed, its the 53% of the country who thinks abortion should only be allowed in certain situations that they need to win over, and this is not the way to do that.

On the grounds that you want people to reject the idea that murder is justified in the defense of innocents, or on the grounds that abortion is not equivalent to murder?



I really have no idea. Last I heard, they cost about $400 each, for about an hour or two work. That's pretty sizeable. I haven't heard of a lot of 'discount, non-profit clinics' akin to what ASPCA is for animal care. I could be wrong, I haven't exactly gone looking for it.



Again, I've seen no evidence for that. I do know in my area there are about five or six clinics which will provide those services. I don't see any reason to assume they're not in competition.



It does significantly reduce numbers. Your argument is akin to saying 'making murder illegal doesn't make it not happen, therefore we shouldn't make it illegal'. The argument really just doesn't hold water.



Neither of those people can produce bills, and both of them have atrocious voting records on the subject. Would you vote for Bush if he said "hey, I'm going to get us out of Iraq and not start any more wars, and I'm going to take steps towards socialized health care." (I assume you wouldn't exactly believe him.)




"Instead of killing all black people, we'll only kill the female black people."

From the pro-life stance of mass abortion being genocide, I really don't know that agreeing to the compromise of only killing half as many fetuses is really an acceptable compromise. If a proposal came up in the UN that, instead of allowing for the violent deaths of all of the Zaghawas in Darfur, we only permitted them to kill all the women, would you consider that an 'acceptable compromise'?

I'm not trying to use hyperbole. If you view abortion as equivalent to murder, then the current legal situation is equivalent to legalized GENOCIDE. Sure, 50% of the population thinks the people you're killing aren't 'real people', but rarely do we have a situation where those committing genocide view their victims as real people.



Basques don't attack non-Spaniards, so no one outside of Spain recognizes them as being relevant - and most don't recognize them as existing. If Basques attacked Americans, we would at least be properly aware of their plight.



Again, I don't think anyone can make the argument that the laws are seriously going to be changed. If there are 100,000 abortions in the US, that means we're looking at an 800,000 person genocide. Is that an acceptable compromise to you? Should we sit back on Darfur and try to tell people that, with a little more patience, we'll be able to get enough support to go and stop the violence there without committing any killing of our own? Is it okay, or even desirable, to wait while those innocent people die, so as to avoid having to look like the bad guy if we go in there early?

Similar article on the topic:

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=32140

(Obviously biased, but brings up some strong points - and does specifically refute a few of Tycho's points, such as Tiller having done it out of charity.)

While I think it'd be a great step if the pro-life side accepted that abortion is not equivalent to murder (even if it is bad), I'd be happy now if they just accepted that murder is not justified in this particular case.


Are you sure it significantly reduces the numbers?  Things like this (admittedly likely to be biased) http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/25s3099.html seem to claim otherwise.



Again, you're confusing willingness to change the laws (ie, make abortion illegal) with willingness to promote programs that reduce the number of abortions.  Yes, I don't expect Clinton or Obama to be pushing for changes to the laws on abortion, but they do seem to want to push for programs which will lead to fewer abortions happening.



It needn't be viewed as a compromise, though.  If a proposal came up in the UN for a program that would save half the people in Darfur, we should jump at it.  Doing so doesn't require us to say "that's all we'll ever try to do," just that we say "this, in and of it self, is a good thing.  We want more, but wanting more doesn't mean we have to reject this."  If the pro-life side wants to reduce the number of abortions, then they should be happy to advance any policy that does that, even if it doesn't meet every one of their goals all at once.  I'm not saying they should give up on changing the laws, just that while they pursue legal methods of changing the law, they can also pursue programs that will reduce the number of abortions regardless of whether they manage to change the laws or not.


Aware of their cause and sympathetic for their cause aren't the same thing, though.  Sure, if ETA attacked americans, more americans would know about them.  But I doubt it would make them more popular (ie, get them more support) in the US.  Al Qaeda is well known in the US, but that doesn't mean many people support it.


If this guy stopped all 800,000 abortions by killing this doctor, perhaps you'd have a point.  But he didn't.  He killed one guy, and in all likelihood reduced the chance of the laws ever being changed.  He's also sent the message that it's okay to kill in order to advance your political views, so that if the laws do change, people might just start shooting people to try and get it put back.  So, instead of 800,000 abortions happening in the next 8 years, there will still be 800,000 abortions happening, and a doctor has been murdered, and people are more likely to think the pro-life movement is full of nutjobs.  This wasn't an act of defense (at least not a successful one), but at best an act of revenge.

And articles like do harm to the pro-life movement as well. And this is from a famous conservative, not just someone who comments more-or-less anonymously on blogs.  This is sort of what I was after from the start.  I wanted to know if those who support murder of abortion doctors were just a small, radical fraction of the pro-life movement, and not representative of the group at all.  But the more I hear people talk about this, the less it seems like that's the case.  I find that very disappointing.

Again, why? I can't see any real argument (aside from abortion not being equivalent to murder) which wouldn't also work against fighting and killing to stop that genocidal maniac from slaughtering his own people. Without saying violence is always wrong, or that there is another serious alternative to be explored, I don't really see a response to this. (Oh, or 'violence is wrong, except when it's in support of my position', but I hardly think that one is really fair.)



With my quick research, I could only find this biased source:
http://www.now.org/issues/abor...e30/beforeafter.html saying 200k-1.2M abortions prior to Roe v Wade, and this reasonably balanced site drawing off biased statistics:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/h...abortion-rates_N.htm
for modern rates, saying rates have ranged between 1.6M and 1.2M in recent history. So, with our admitedly biased rates, we're looking at a shift from about 200k-1.2M to 1.2-1.6M. There is a pretty clear shift. And since the rate immediately after Roe v. Wade (when we can assume there would be little reason for people to pursue an illegal abortion), the rate was only 600-700k, it seems to suggest the idea of making something illegal does not decrease its incidence fails to stand in this case.

(Unrelated, please do NOT read this link until after you agree with me already. I'm posting it just so I don't forget it, since it looks to have some good info.

http://www.catholics-united.or...rtion-in-america.pdf

Remember, you promised not to read it!)



A lot of the suggestions made under say Bill Clinton are contrary to the morals of many of the pro-life side. So it's like saying we'll reduce the killings in Darfur, if we make the one group a slave class to the other. Is that a good compromise? Of course not. It may be 'better' than genocide, but it's still not morally acceptable.



Assuming the new programs aren't also immoral. Granted, a law against partial-birth abortion would be a great chance, but I don't even think we'll see that in the near future.



Well, the Americans have to see the situation as unfair against the Basques, and not see themselves as the specific target. I actually took a class on this sort of thing wow, back in like '03. I should dig up my notes.

Simply said, if you're not getting any attention, if you're not a current issue with a reason why it's pressing, it's not going to get addressed. The squeaky wheel gets the oil.



That's true. This will really amount to very little if no one else acts upon that inertia. But should we judge the rightness of an action by the actual results, or by the intended results?



I don't think that's fair. If he honestly thought there was a chance to save a single fetus (and I don't think that's an unfair assumption), then it was defending an innocent. Again, this is someone who, the next day, was likely going to go to kill one or more fetuses. If you have the opportunity to kill someone whose sole job is to kill other people, I'm of the opinion that you have a moral responsibility to take that! Even if that guy is going to be replaced by another guy, that doesn't mean you have no responsibility to act.

You'll notice the rush of the righteous to kill military snipers.

How about "violence in this case doesn't actually achieve the desired goal, so only makes things worse?"  This is a bigger issue than just one doctor, and killing one doctor won't make it go away.  Pro-lifers can't stop abortion by murdering doctors.  It's simply not an effective method.  You can't use an "ends justify the means" argument if you don't actually achieve any desirable end.




I dunno, I'm not convinced.  First of all, the two ranges overlap:  1.2 million is the amount these sources say happened in 2005, and 1.2M is within the possible range estimated for the 50s and 60s, so "no significant change" is certainly possible within the accuracy levels we have from these sources.  Also, we need to keep in mind that the US population has increased significantly from the 50s to 2005.  In 1950 there were about 152M people in the US.  Today there are estimated to be about 300M, or about double what there were in 1950.  If the rate of abortion stayed the same, we should still expect double the number of abortions today that there were in the 1950s, or 400K-2.4M per year, and 1.2-1.6M is within that range.  Just going on these numbers (which unfortunately have a rather wide spread for the 50s and 60s estimates), I don't think its fair to say there's strong evidence that Roe v Wade made abortion more common.


Well...okay...but that might be a long time off! ;)  What is it I have to agree with you about before reading it?


This sort of is non-starter, then.  If one side is completely unwilling to compromise on a number of different issues, is there anything else to do but just have everyone shoot each other, and whoever's standing at the end makes all the rules?  I personally don't want that to be how we do things in the US (or anywhere, for that matter).  If people have disagreements about what's right or wrong, is there a better way to deal with it than shooting each other?  I'd like to think there is.  And I definitely don't want people to think that if they can't get everyone to accept their personal moral code by making it the law, that they should then go around shooting people.  I don't want a muslim to shoot me if I drink a beer.  I don't want a jewish person to shoot me if I have a job that requires me to work on the sabbath.  I don't want a vegetarian to shoot me if I stop being vegetarian.  I don't want a republican to shoot me if I think torture is wrong.  I don't want a catholic to shoot me if use a condom.  And so on.  If everyone feels that they should shoot people who don't follow their moral code, there won't be many of us left.


I think we could see such a law, if the pro-life side doesn't try to use it as a 'foot in the door' law, and add language to the law specifically designed to make further anti-abortion laws easier.  That doesn't mean they can't still push for further laws, just that by treating a partial-birth abortion ban as a tool rather than a goal in-and-of itself, they end up turning people against it who might otherwise support it.  I think most people (and most politicians) would be fine with a partial birth abortion ban if they didn't think accepting it would have a direct affect on the legality of other types of abortion.  This has happened a few times before, where politicians object to the language in a law that they would otherwise support, because the language is designed (or appears to be designed) to call into question the legality of other laws rather than be limited to the specific issue the law is about.


True, but simply getting attention doesn't mean getting your issue addressed.  Acts of terrorism might draw attention, but they don't usually achieve the goal their perpetrators are after.



I think both are important.  As are the likely results.  Having delusions of grandeur doesn't make an action more moral.  I still feel that this man is a murderer, though, and should be rejected without qualification by the pro-life movement.  Even if he though millions of people would rise up and join him in murdering doctors, I still don't think that would make his actions justified.


But what you're saying is that it's important to kill, even if it doesn't actually save anyone.  I reject that.  That's vengence.  You can call it vigilante justice if you like, but it's not stopping abortion, it's just an attempt to dole out judgment.  A responsibility to act isn't the same as a responsibility to kill.

Ah, so if killing abortion doctors would achieve the desired goal (of reducing abortions), THEN you would think his actions were justifiable?




I was doing some research and someone put up a better response to this article than I could make:
http://blackadderiv.wordpress....s-the-abortion-rate/



Assuming there were no bias in the numbers whatsoever, you are correct. But even from the start, we're saying when abortion became illegal and there were 700k abortions, that that means there were 500k illegal abortions! How could illegal abortions basically outnumber legal ones?



Basically everything would be nice, but that making abortion illegal reduces numbers would be nice (I think. I've already forgotten what the article says, so I could be wrong. Perhaps you would be good enough to read it and then tell me what you should agree with (and then agree with it) on my behalf.)



There are compromises available. Check out the RCC's Gabriel Project, as an example. It's free counseling and support for pregnant women, to try and help them feel stable and comfortable enough to make a good decision, not under duress. If the government were willing to fund a project like this, that would be a compromise. Saying 'sure, we all want to reduce this behavior you think is immoral. Instead of this, let's compromise and put up this other program you also think is immoral' is hardly compromise on the part of Hillary and Obama. That's Hillary and Obama doing what they want regardless as to what the other side wants, then acting surprise that the other side doesn't want what Hillary and Obama want. Compromise means BOTH sides give something.



I think there is. But there's a critical addendum to that.

If I think killing black people is okay, and you think it's wrong, we should definitely talk it out. But while we are discussing the possibility of genocide being morally wrong, we shouldn't be committing genocide! That seems like a really basic precaution. If abortion is murder, and very strong, non-religious arguments have been made for that, we shouldn't be permitting, muchless funding that until the issue is properly settled. Otherwise we're just the UN sitting around bickering while Darfur is ethnically cleansed, which seems to me to be a very undesirable stance to take.



I disagree, simply because we have such strong lobbyist groups, like Planned Parenthood, who don't want that, and currently both Congress and the POTUS are basically getting huge funds from that group - with no incentive from the other side at all. If I were paying you $20,000 to do X, and someone else wasn't paying you anything at all, why would you go against my wishes to help him? Especially when abortion is becoming less and less of a current issue among voters? It's losing relevancy.



Again, shifting US opinion on Palestine seems to say otherwise. Similarly, more people are becoming aware of abuses in Nigeria - because Nigerian rebels are committing acts of economic terrorism. We aren't shifting our opinion of Al Qaeda, by and large, because Al Qaeda declared war on us specifically - they've made it clear their goal isn't so much to get attention, but to destroy us. War takes precedence over charity.



And again, if millions of people did rise up and start killing doctors, then would he be justified?



No, I think it's important to kill if there's a reasonable chance it will save a life. And I don't know that he didn't save lives. Monday morning, Tiller did not go in to the office and perform an abortion. Nor Tuesday or Wednesday. All of those people scheduled to go in, or who were thinking of going in, had to postpone, and perhaps rethink. Did one of those mothers change her mind? I don't know. But I don't think it unreasonable.

Not sure, to be honest.  But since this was pretty much doomed not to significantly reduce abortions (and arguable could increase the number performed in the long run), that's not really an issue.  Like I said, you can't say the ends justify the means if you don't actually accomplish the ends.  Do some ends justify murder as a mean?  I'm not sure, honestly.  But I'm quite confident that this isn't a case where they do, and am surprised/disappointed that more pro-lifers aren't saying so.


I'm not sure I follow what you're saying here.  Could you rephrase it?



Okay, just read it over.  It's actually a thought-provoking document.  Not sure what I was meant to agree with you about first, but it does seem to be saying what I was: there's more progress to be made in reducing the number of abortions by doing things other than over-turning Roe-v-Wade.  This is actually the kind of thing I was hoping to see, and seems like a big step in the right direction.  Yay for these guys.  Consider me slightly less pessimistic about things for having read it. :)


That seems like a decent project, though from what I saw it was conditional (ie, you only get help if you agree not to have an abortion).  Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it's not quite "making them feel stable and comfortable enough to make a good decision."  I'd have no problem at all with the government funding a program that did just what you say: provide council and aid for women with unwanted pregnancies, so that they feel less pressure to make the decision one way or the other.  I think that would result in fewer abortions, even if the program wasn't predicated on the women entering it not getting one.


And what is the pro-life side willing to give ground on then?


But is there any chance of it being "properly settled?"  This essentially results in a "because I happen to think something is really bad, you're never allowed to do it until you can convince me it's okay.  Oh, and by the way, you can't convince me it's okay."  It's not like we're waiting for some data to settle the issue.  It's purely a difference of opinion on the value of a fetus.  It's not something we can measure and say "ah, okay, looks like this side has been right all along."  If I say "gun ownership is morally equivalent to genocide!" should everyone give up their guns until you convince me I'm wrong?  If I say "eating meat is equivalent to genocide!" should everyone have to be vegetarian until you convince me otherwise?  This last one is a pretty good example, I think.  I'm a vegetarian.  I think killing animals for meat is a bad thing to do, morally/ethically.  Especially things like pigs.  And I think factory farming is cruel/unethical.  I think it'd be great if people became vegetarian (okay, I'm exaggerating a bit, and admittedly don't feel as strongly about it pro-lifers do, but imagine I do for the illustration).  Should I expect everyone else to stop eating meat because I feel it's so bad?  Should I feel justified in killing farmers if I can't get people to agree with me?  Many more animals get killed each year than there are abortions.  Should I start shooting people because I can't get meat made illegal?






Well, if you and 10 of your friends would be more likely to vote for me for helping you than if I help the guy who's paying me, it would make a difference.  Sure, planned parenthood would probably object to any law limiting abortion rights, but they're not the only lobby group or special interest that politicians listen to.  Most objection to laws that ban partial birth abortion has been, I believe, not to the ban itself, but rather to the language included in the laws that define fetuses as "human beings" or otherwise try set precedent beyond the partial birth abortion case.




As I say, US opinion on palestine isn't shifting because people like to pull for whoever shoots more rockets.  It's because of the suffering that people see caused.  It's the violence and oppression that Israel conducts that is shifting support to palestinians, not the actions of Hamas.  Likewise, when people in the US see the results of Hamas rocket attacks on Israel, that tends to help the Israeli cause, rather than the palestinian cause.



No.  In that case, I wouldn't think the ends would justify the means, but at least there would be an end which someone might consider to outweigh the cost of the means.  I would still think it was wrong, but someone else might think otherwise.  But without the end, the means are left completely unjustified.


Would you think it unreasonable if vegetarians started shooting people eating big macs?  If it saved one cow, or even had a chance of saving one cow, would it reasonable to murder someone?

The numbers (all from geittmeunster, or whatever it's called - the research branch of Planned Parenthood) says that abortions were up to 1.2M prior to Roe v. Wade, but 700,000 immediately after. That suggests either there was HUGE variance year-to-year, or that immediately after Roe v. Wade, there were 500,000 people going out to get highly dangerous illegal abortions, even while they could get them done legally. That simply doesn't make sense. Why, when illegal abortions are highly dangerous and ILLEGAL, would still half of all women choose them over legal abortions?



Seeing as the 'side' isn't all one giant hive-mind, that's not exactly a question with a concise answer. Different groups are willing to give different amounts. I'm sure some are very happy for free condom programs. In general though, I imagine most groups are willing to give a fair bit, but the line in the sand (on either side) is when the behavior is unethical.

Since the current setup is basically 'anyone can have an abortion for any reason at any time', it doesn't seem like the pro-life side has a whole lot to give up - they've already lost, basically in every respect. The pro-choice side has everything they want - legal abortions, their form of sex-ed, a stacked supreme court, house and executive branch. What non-immoral stuff is left for the pro-life side to give?



But there's no way you can prove that a black person is equal value to a white person. It's cultural perceptions. If I insist black people are naturally the inferior race, and mine is naturally the superior race, that's not really an argument you can 'prove' wrong. Because I can't be reasoned with, does that mean now it's okay for me to go back to killing black people?



I think if you could come up with a compelling argument I can't disprove, that killing say a pig is equivalent to killing a human, I think we should ban it, or at least seriously consider banning it. I don't know if killing a dolphin is equivalent to killing a person, but the fact that I can't prove it isn't means that the death of a dolphin may be murder - and I'd best try hard not to permit it.

The fewer people who believe it, the more convincing the evidence would have to be (and the more dire the consequences - not drinking beer because we believe it'll lead to hair loss isn't something big enough worth banning beer over).

I would consider 50% of the population holding an argument equivalent to the opposition that abortion is murder meaning, pretty strongly, that there is no obviously correct answer, and if we have to choose about possibly increasing the population and pain and suffering of people, or possibly permitting the greatest genocide ever. That really is the choice that we face. I for one think allowing for a few more kids to grow up in broken homes is better than committing mass, institutionalized genocide. I suspect most would agree.



That is true, but my point is, prior to the '78(?) olympics, no one really knew (or cared) about Palestine. Prior to acts of violence in the public's face, there was no support for Palestine because no one knew it existed. In some cases, any attention is good attention. As long as people are dying, or at risk, it encourages the public to focus on solving THIS problem. Not solving THIS problem means more people die.



And why would you think it wrong? Because it is always wrong to kill? Or is it, again, just because you personally don't think abortion is equivalent to murder?



I think the premise of saving cows is unreasonable, so yes. If I shared the belief that cows are unfortunate, self-conscious victims, being regularly abused and beaten, until they're finally slaughtered, all to fulfill a market demand, no, I'd think the idea of ending a few lives to save a few thousand lives was reasonable. This is, of course, assuming they are organized to actually spread out and maintain these attacks. The truth is, if there were regularly reports about people dying after eating a big mac, the number of big macs people eat would decrease. That's just how terrorism works. Fewer big macs means less demand (assuming they don't just buy two hamburgers and stack them :P ) means fewer cows raised and killed. Or alternatively, if McDonald's sees itself losing business, it will make a BUSINESS decision and shift to another method - perhaps free-range cows, or more tofu burgers or something, if it thought this would ultimately profit it more. Businesses regularly give in to terrorist demands, because to do otherwise is simply unprofitable.